January 2023: Michigan Review Finished and a Plan for Foreign Names
In January 2023 we finished reviewing Michigan, returned to Italy and began work in Indiana and Japan. We also explain how we plan to show non-Latin facility names and feature two Pools of the Month.
In January 2023 we finished reviewing Michigan and returned to Italy, and this pool listings update also explains how we plan to display facility names written in other alphabets.
Listing reviews
We finished reviewing the listings in Michigan and went back to Italy in the hope of making progress there.
The Italian listings still contain a lot of unsatisfactory information. We have been working in the southeastern region of Apulia, where we often find a pool's website or social media page that has clearly not been updated in a long time. We send an inquiry and get no answer. Where it will help, we add a note to the listing saying how soft the information is. We know you need better information, and we want you to know the limits of what we could confirm.
Because Italy was slow going, we moved up to New Brunswick, Canada, and got through its listings in a few days. We then added Indiana and Japan, so we will work on Italy, Indiana and Japan for a while.
Last month we announced that the directory had reached 26,000 listings. On January 26 the count dropped to 25,999, and by the end of January it was back up to 26,005.
Foreign-language facility names
We are developing a consistent way to display the names of facilities in countries that use an alphabet other than the Latin alphabet. In the past we most often showed a translation of the meaning of the facility's name, followed by a vertical bar ("|"), followed by the name in the original language.
An example is the «Atlant» Swimming Pool in Moscow, shown as "«Atlant» Swimming Pool | Бассейн «Атлант»". We plan to change the first part of the displayed name from a translation of the meaning to a transliteration of roughly what the Russian name sounds like. The heading would then read "Basseyn «Atlant» | Бассейн «Атлант»". The idea is to make it easier to tell locals, in their own language, where you want to go.
We will keep the translated name in the listing but move it to the start of the first address line, ahead of the street name and house number. For the Moscow listing, that line would read "«Atlant» Swimming Pool, Ulitsa Talalikhina, 28, Central District".
The change will take a long time, and the results may occasionally look odd. We think it will help most of the time for listings in Russia, Greece, Israel, China, Japan, Thailand and similar countries.
