Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

news.ycombinator.com

261–270 of 527 posts

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#261
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I usually do if I need the name at all, but sometimes you need to interface with systems that need that data split. A simple, unimportant one: how do you politely address the person? In Germany, you'd start a letter with "Sehr geehrte Frau Dr. Musterfrau", which implies knowing the last name, gender and title of the person. You can drop the title, but dropping the gender makes the whole thing impersonal.…

It's interesting how in Germany there is so much accent on titles. Every country has their own interface standards and it is always educational to dig in to that for a bit to get acquainted with the local customs so you don't end up making some kind of faux pas. And sometimes those standards are very fluid, someone calling you 'Sir' may do so in a mildly sarcastic manner to get the point across, they don't necessaril…

Sir-itis is particularly endemic to the Philippines, in no small part thanks to call center scripts. At one point we had a company driver who insisted (quite seriously, no sarcasm involved) on calling his passengers Sir Firstname.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#262
post #67

Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same. The family/given name format doesn't make much sense here. Indian name: Sathiavelllu Arunachalam, known as SA or Seth SE Asian ethnic Chinese names: Harry Lee Kuan Yew, (English name) (Surname) (Given name). Hated the name Harry and got it removed, though many Chinese are referred to by an English name. Indonesian name: Fatimah Azzahra (…

For the record, traditional Indian names are far more complicated. Consider the name of a famous violinist, Lalgudi Gopala Jayaraman Radhakrishnan, also known as Lalgudi G. J. R. Krishnan. From a Western perspective, 'Lalgudi' isn't strictly a 'name' per se: it is a toponymic surname , and is the name of a taluk (or administrative subdivision: it is a third-order division after state, and district) in Tamil Nadu. Gop…

Thanks for the clarification. Not that familar with Indian names, and interesting to know it's as complicated as others.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#263
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you're overthinking. One field for "full name" and another for "how you want to be addressed" is way simpler than the "rules" you list above. And also consider that you've only listed rule for two cases (and your rules are wrong, or at best incomplete), and have left out the hundreds of other rules for other languages and cultures.

There is no list. Either you live in China and fill in your name in Chinese. Or you don’t live in China and you write your name in English.

Hong Kong is in China and everyone has an English legal name and most people have a Chinese legal name. The English name may be a Romanisation of the Chinese name, a western name or a combination. Depending on which combination of names you have, your nationality and the specific situation, the Chinese or English one may take precedence e.g some government departments prefer the Chinese name but most businesses prefer the English names unless it's a Mainland Chinese business.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve. Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required. Given/family removes ambig…

The original sin is assuming that names have a particular structure. But at least First/Last places the burden of that sin not on the user. My partner has only given names. When forms ask for their “Family name”, my internal thought process goes like this: 1. WTF do I write here? 2. Why are they asking for Family name? Oh they are probably just Anglophone and assume this is how names are. 3. It’s okay, just lie on th…

First and last is worse because having first name registered as family name adds extra half a day to your schedule to be spent around support desk, and given/family nomenclature exists because it's just unnecessary pain.

Your partner and billion others from their cultural sphere with single-field name system is a testament that concatenated two-field name system is the problem and is actually not working due to the falsehoods, not that the first/last nomenclature is better than given/family which is much less ambiguous.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point isn't that it's first and last, it's to avoid an implicit assumption that they are in a particular order. That semantic correspondence is exactly what changing to given/family is supposed to preserve. Yes, there are people with only one. There is/was a fairly well-known example in UK network infrastructure circles. That's a problem in either system if you make the fields required. Given/family removes ambig…

The original sin is assuming that names have a particular structure. But at least First/Last places the burden of that sin not on the user. My partner has only given names. When forms ask for their “Family name”, my internal thought process goes like this: 1. WTF do I write here? 2. Why are they asking for Family name? Oh they are probably just Anglophone and assume this is how names are. 3. It’s okay, just lie on th…

unfortunately, I need to remember which one of first and last name is family name... I always directly search.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't say hello, just state your business.

I here this trope so much. It is tiring and closed-minded. Are you Western culture and male? Probably. I have seen whole blog posts dedicated to this matter. Really? This matter is so stressful that people need to write 100s of words about it? Sheesh. Are you aware that it is polite to start a convo with people from South Asia with a small greeting? They wait for you to ack. If you don't ack, they will not continue.…

Who decides which side should do the adapting?

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people have more than one passport (multiple citizenship) and could use a different one to enter different countries because of visas. The name could be partly different on those passports. But yes, they probably know the passport they'll use since the time they buy the ticket.

I as an example have 2 passports, and my name is first middle1 middle2 last. One of my passports has my name like that, the other is first middle1 last, so even between passports its not the same, as one of them drops one of my middle names.

I know people hate the idea of all three of world government, government IDs, and reducing people to numbers, but things would be a lot easier if we could just write on forms "I'm person number 15389247652" and let name matching be relegated to historical documents.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#269
post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Very interesting however >People have exactly one canonical full name. What is on your passport then?

My passport has two of my names in both Ukrainian Cyrillic and Latinized form, neither of which is my full legal name per Ukrainian law. My id however has a legal full name in Cyrillic, but not in Latin. To make matters worse, the same set of Cyrillic characters can be represented by different Latin characters and it's somewhat up to me to decide how it's spelled when the document is issued. Since I can have more then one passport at the same time, the names in Latin don't even have to match.

Then I have a residence permit in a different country, where my full legal name is spelled in Latin characters based on what is written in my birth certificate (which you guessed -- is in Cyrillic). So the Latin rendering there is entirely based on what I asked the translator to write there.

In the end, out of three documents I can id myself with, no pair has the same combination of characters for my name.

add:

To make matters even worse, my original birth certificate (not the one I have now) was issued by the soviet union and uses russian cyrillic and the same name there is both spelled and pronounced differently.

Re: Ask HN: How to handle Asian-style “Family name first” when designing interfaces?

#270
post #14

Definitely read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... if you haven't yet. Then think about what are the requirements your system needs when it comes to names. Does the app need to know what a user's name is at all or is a username enough? Does it need to distinguish the family part of their name for anything? A thing I think is the most general is to just have a Full Name field (min length 1…

Very interesting however >People have exactly one canonical full name. What is on your passport then?

I'm from Ireland, an English-speaking country in Western Europe. I have a name that is a typical Western name. In theory, I should be the happy path for any name system.

But even I don't have one canonical full name. Even with just the government, the name on my birth certificate, passport, and tax documents is different.

Name 1: I was named by my parents after a friend of theirs. That friend commonly went by a short version of the name (think "Jessie" vs "Jessica", though that's not the real example). Anyway, since I was born in Ireland in the 90s, my parents had me baptised by the Catholic Church, which expected you to name your kids after saints. In the form which the saints used. This was less about any strong faith on their behalf, and more of the fact that it made it easier to get into any of the 90% of schools run by the Catholic Church. I think even then, it depended a little on which priest you were dealing with as to how strict they were with the name rules.

But anyway, the extended, "saint's" form of my name was needed for the baptism, so my parent's put it on the birth cert, plus a middle name. They (and consequently I) never used the extended version of my name, but my birth cert reads "ExtendedFirst Middle Last"

Name 2: Anyway, then my teenage years came and I went abroad and I filled out a passport application form to get one for that. It had fields for first name, middle name, and last name. So I put in the first name I actually use, dutifully filled out the middle name field even though I never use that, and then put in my last name. So my passport has "First Middle Last".

Name 3: Then when I came to actually paying tax as an adult, I had to provide details to the tax office and my first employer that lined up. At this point my middle name was well and truly out of use, so both got just "First Last". This is also the form of my name that appears on most utility bills, professional correspondence, etc.

Name 4: And then on top of that, I have a nickname I'm commonly known by. This is what's on a lot of personal correspondence (sometimes as just Nickname, sometimes as Nickname LastName), what people call me face to face, etc.

Now a lot of countries have a concept of a singular "legal name". In some countries it may be at least procedurally incorrect or sometimes even legally fraud if you were to use something else in passport applications, tax documents, etc. But Ireland does not. If you use something as your name, it is your name. Most government interactions will accept evidence (such as utility bills, employment contracts, etc.) that you've been using it for 6 months to update the above documents.

For any of the 4 variations above, I could provide enough evidence to the government to get them to update the other documents in line, but it's just not important. But if I was to bother I'd use "First Last" as the target name, and I'd actually rather not update the passport as I travel to the US frequently enough and "your name is different to last time you were here" strikes me as the kind of thing to make US immigration unhappy.

Alternatively, you can register a deed poll to get a piece of government paper stating effectively "X Y Z has informed the government they're now known as A B". But this is not a prerequisite to changing your name, just a way of short circuiting the process if you're stuck getting documentary evidence that you have changed your name via other mechanisms.

And that's all before we get into marriages, gender transitions, Irish vs English names, immigrants who anglicise their names, confirmation names, etc.

Post reply on HN