I was wondering if there was a website which listed how each country (or, perhaps more specifically, each major language) in the world pronounces the names of all other countries on Earth in their native languages. For example, how is Switzerland pronounced in Saudi Arabia and how South Korea is pronounced in Uganda. I’ve always been curious about how each country’s name gets translated in a number of different languages.
So, is there such a website that details this many possible permutations of countries’ names? Thanks.
Awesome, yeah this is sort of what I was looking for. It doesn’t have any Arabic or African languages, however. But I guess this is a good start! Thanks!
The CIA World Factbook has pronunciations for some country names, but the FAQ says that they don’t do so for all of them because of variations in how the names are pronounced.
As to the written form of the names in the major languages, you can also use the Regional hierarchy of the Open Directory - navigate to a country, then click a link in the section “This category in other languages:” of the page. This gives you the information that Costa Rica is Kostaryka in Polish, Saudi Arabia is Arabia Saudita in Italian, the USA are Usono in Esperanto etc. (the names that the Open Directory uses are the common names, not the full formal ones.)
I found this amusing when I was in Vietnam. Like English, with English-specific names like “Germany” and “Peking”, the Vietnamese have their own recognised words used as names for places like the United States, France etc. But it was cool when I looked at a world map, and because my own country Australia has such open spaces, there is always room on a map for relatively small towns to appear. These would in no way be household names in Vietnam, so the cartographers had to transliterate as best they could. It made for some bizarre reading.
