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kmoser 13 hours ago

> Would your customer representative be able to pronounce my name somewhat correctly?

Are you implying the CSR's lack of familiarity with the pronunciation of your name means your name should be stored/rendered incorrectly?

Muromec 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Quite the opposite actually. I want it stored correctly and in a way that both me and CSR can understand and so it can be used to interface with other systems.

I don’t however know which unicode subset to use, because you didn’t tell me in the signup form. I have many options, all of them correct, but I don’t know whether your CSR can read Ukrainian Cyrillic and whether you can tell what vocative case is and not use that when inerfacing with the government CA which expects nominative.

ACS_Solver 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think you're touching on another problem, which is that we as users rarely know why the form wants a name. Is it to be used in emails, or for sending packages, or for talking to me?

My language also has a separate vocative case, but I live in a country that has no concept of it and just vestiges of a case system. I enter my name in the nominative, which then of course looks weird if I get emails/letters from them later - they have no idea to use the vocative. If I knew the form is just for sending me emails, I'd maybe enter my name in the vocative.

Engineers, or UX designers, or whoever does this, like to pretend names are simple. They're just not (obligatory reference to the "falsehoods about names" article). There are many distinct cases for why you may want my name and they may all warrant different input.

- Name to use in letters or emails. It doesn't matter if a CSR can pronounce this if it's used in writing, it should be a name I like to see in correspondence. Maybe it's in a script unfamiliar to most CSRs, or maybe it's just a vocative form.

- Name for verbal communication. Just about anything could be appropriate depending on the circumstances. Maybe an anglicized name I think your company will be able to pronounce, maybe a name in a non-Latin script if I expect it to be understood here, maybe a name in a Latin-extended script if I know most people will still say it reasonably well intuitively. But it could also be an entirely different name from the written one if I expect the written one to be butchered.

- Name for package deliveries. If I'm ordering a package from abroad, I want my name (and address) written in my local convention - I don't care if the vendor can't read it, first the package will make its way to my country using the country and postal code identifiers, and then it should have info that makes sense to the local logistics companies, not to the seller's IT system.

- Legal name because we're entering a contract or because my ID will be checked later on for some reason.

- Machine-readable legal name for certain systems like airlines. For most of the world's population, this is not the same as the legal name but of course English-language bias means this is often overlooked.

dgfitz 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In this specific case, it seems like your concerns are a hypothetical, no?

swiftcoder 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Not really, no. A lot of us only really have to deal with English-adjacent input (i.e. European languages that share the majority of character forms with English, or cultures that explicitly Anglicise their names when dealing with English folks).

As soon as you have to deal with users with a radically different alphabet/input-method, the wheels tend to come off. Can your CSR reps pronounce names written in Chinese logographs? In Arabic script? In the Hebrew alphabet?

cowsandmilk 7 hours ago | parent [-]

You can analyze the name and direct a case to a CSR who can handle it. May be unrealistic for a 1-2 person company, but every 20+ person company I’ve worked at has intentionally hired CSRs with different language abilities.

Muromec 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

First of, no you can't infer language preference from a name. The reasonable and well meaning assumption about my name on a good day makes me only sad and irritated.

And even if you could, I don't know if you actually do it by looking at what you signup form asks me to input.

michaelt 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A requirement to do that is an extremely broad definition of "treat strings as opaque blobs most of the time" IMHO :)