Hi !
So I am trying to get my new map software (android app using osmdroid-android library) to display labels (street, names) on map in specific language, in this case I want to have it displayed in Irish (Gaelic) and not in English.
Is this possible (when you change language on Google Maps for example, labels are display in Irish for example) to do this, or would this require creation of your own tile server, that would “burn” Irish names into Tiles?
Sorry for such a newbie question, but I have been researching this for last few days, and not getting much nearer to answer by myself.
What I could determine so far, is that I would have create my own tile server, something similar that Germans did for their solution (see https://github.com/giggls/openstreetmap-carto-de/)), that would have Irish names on tiles instead of English ones? Is this assumption correct or am I going wrong way?
Any hints (or pointers to right direction) will be very welcome.
Kind regards,
Andy
Are you already committed to “tiles” in your app?
There are offline vector maps available with multilingual support. For example, openandromaps.org maps, which work in various apps including Locus Map, my personal favourite.
Hong Kong is a great example, almost perfectly tagged for multiple languages. The OAM Hong Kong map in Locus shows both Chinese+English names (eg “九龍 Kowloon”, matching local convention for the “name” tag) when “Local” is selected in the app, or just English or just Chinese when those languages are selected in the app (matching name:en or name:zh). The three language combinations are compiled into the downloadable map for that area.
If you go that route (vector maps), the MapsForge library should be quite helpful.
PS, I see the OAM map for Ireland, a 218MB download, supports languages “de,en,ga”. Your success with Ireland, of course, will depend on how much of the region is tagged with “name:ga”. 
Hi !
So far I am not committed to anything, I am still researching which solution to go with.
I selected OSM in beginning with plan to use offline maps, which didn’t work so well, since it was impossible to download all the tiles from the server, not even with their “official” grabber, then I resigned to using OSM online, when I noticed the names problem, so I started researching what to do with that, and this brought me here…
Your solution looks very promising, so I just need to look into MapForge library and go further with that. I already downloaded maps, now I just need some free time to experiment with this.
Thanks for your advice
Andy