This is not a problem of different languages in the first place, but a naming dispute: Names - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Therefore using ‘name:xx’ cannot solve this unfortunately.
You are mixing languages and countries. The example already shows: if ‘name:en’ was about how officials call it: is it the British or US American official name or maybe the Indian one or the Ghanaian or the Australian?
This is getting worse with ‘name’ obviously.
- unreadable depends on what language/scripts you are familiar with. For a lot of people in the world English is unreadable.
- do you more like a shameful to you, but readable to others ‘name’ for a place in Croatia? Or should it better be in the local language like described in Names - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Problem: there is no local language for international territories.
But assuming we solve this by defaulting to English, we still end up with a dispute about the English name “Arabian Gulf” vs “Persian Gulf”.
That is the topic of this thread.
Problem: there are no “people on the ground” in the middle of the sea.
Watching the Atlantic Ocean: repeated name removal debate the osm community has not found a solution for this yet.
It’s our turn:
- to find a solution we should ask “how to resolve naming disputes when there are no people on the ground”.
- for politically disputed areas we could also more strictly use A/B names with unpolitical ordering like A being the name that existed first or the first in the alphabet