Internationalisation of people names

If a system does not possess the ability to capture, store, and retrieve people names, according to their cultural requirements, it is less likely to be acceptable on the international market. Internationalisation of people names could reduce the probability of a person’s name being lost in a system, avoiding frustration, saving time, and possibly money. This study attempts to determine the extent to which the human name can be internationalised, based upon published anthroponymic data for 148 locales, by categorising them into eleven distinctly autonomous parts: definite article, common title, honorific title, nickname, by-name, particle, forename, patronymic or matronymic, surname, community name, and generational marker. This paper provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of internationalising people names; examining the challenges of terminology conflicts, the impact of subjectivity whilst pigeonholing personyms, and the consequences of decisions made. It has demonstrated that the cultural variety of human names can be expressed with the Locale Data Mark-up Language for 74% of the world’s countries. This study, which spans 1,919 anthroponymic syntactic structures, has also established, through the use of a unique form of encoding, that the extent to which the human name can be internationalised is 96.31% of the data published by Plassard (1996) and Interpol (2006). Software developers, localisation engineers, and database administrators may benefit from this paper, through recognition of this problem and understanding the potential gains from accurately handling people names within a system. The outcome of this study opens up opportunities for future research into cultural name mapping that may further enhance the Common Locale Data Repository.