Google maps get romanized names in Asia

[bill]

I just noticed this today. When looking at maps of Japan via

maps.google.com

we now have both the Japanese and Romanized spellings of place names. Previously there was only Japanese. If you use Google Japan's interface you only see the Japanese.

Osaka, Japan - maps.google.com [maps.google.com]

Osaka, Japan - maps.google.co.jp [maps.google.co.jp]

This works the same for China and Taiwan as well. This is great if you can't read the local language.

[LifeinAsia]

Cool! Thanks for the update.

[bill]

Looks like the people at Google's Lat Long Blog had announced this here: Transliteration for Japan [google-latlong.blogspot.com]