Handling names in Asia Pacfic Region

[marcus.liberman]

We have been experimenting with the internationalisation/localisation possibilities in Civi and in many regions this is going to work well for us. However when dealing with our Asia Pacific offices, the following has come up:

In Malaysia (as well as Singapore), the Chinese have their surnames at the front. If the Chinese has an English name, then the English name would be placed first, followed by surname and the given Chinese name. I am at a dilemma on how to represent it in Civi.

I thought of placing the Engish name in First name, Chinese name in Middle name and surname in Last name. However, the Middle name cannot seem to be searched. I’ve tried configuring the CiviCRM Profile and include Middle name into the profile plus make it searchable. It doesn’t seem to work.

Ideally it would be nice if there could be a Chinese name (in English) field, a Chinese name (in Chinese characters) and Displayed Name field where it takes the First Name, Middle Name, Last Name and Chinese Name (in English), in that order.

Is this possible? Or can anyone suggest some alternative approaches? Given that people seem to work in both languages at once I don't think using the different field versions for each language is going to work as they have to be displayed simultaneously.

Thanks in advance for any help

Marcus

[Donald Lobo]

a few random thoughts

1. you should store the chinese name in english and chinese as custom fields

2. we should "hook-ify" the display name process for 2.3 so folks can write a custom display / sort name function and use other data. This should allow you to embed the chinese english name as the middle name

3. in 2.4 (or when we make 5.1 a requirement), the display_name and sort_name should be triggers and computed when changed. Simplifies the code and moves more work into the db We can potentially do that in 2.3 if we do the hook (and then the hook does nothing, while the db does the work). maybe a good project for the UK developer camp?

awesome to hear that u'll are deploying it in asia / pacific also. we need more users from that part of the world

lobo


lobo

[marcus.liberman]

Thanks for the thoughts on all that Lobo. Glad there are some routes to explore.

Just to clarify, if we used the middle name, how do we get that to be searchable? If we do the work on building the display and sort name as you suggest, will that solve this? Is the search on the sort name?

Happy to explore how we can get the necessary dev done. Maybe we can explore this at the camp as you suggest - although we will need some help! But I gather you will be there to do that!

Lots of roll-out in Asia Pac planned. Happy to share what we learn from that.

Best wishes

Marcus

[Donald Lobo]

all the searching happens on sort_name (unless u r using specific name field search in profile)

lobo

[Piotr Szotkowski]

You can also try going multilingual and then have the English and Chinese names as two ‘translations’ of the same name.

Caveats:
— multilingual stuff is not considered totally stable by us; I’m working this Summer to stabilise/enhance it, so it might be better to attempt with CiviCRM 2.3,
— multilingual features require that you either have the SUPER privilege (MySQL 5.0) or CREATE/DROP TRIGGER privileges (MySQL 5.1),
— you seem to want to have both English and Chinese names shown at the same time, which would require hacking the templates in the multilingual scenario.

[permaculturegeek]

I know this is a very old thread, but it's the only one (or at least the first) which came up when googling civicrm asian names, so I shall comment.

Firstly, I would regard the English name of a Chinese person (which I'll use here as a shortcut for "person from a culture which places family name first", which isn't only China) as a nickname. They tend to be self-chosen and cannot be used for official purposes. (We had a visitor who had chosen "Saruman"!).

Next, I would consider renaming the first and last names as "given name" and "family name" - which many Govt. departments do around here. This makes it clear which name you want in which field, since some people tend to reverse their non-western name when writing it in a Western context (intending to avoid confusion but inadvertently creating extra confusion)

Lastly, if your database is highly multicultural, it might be useful to have a boolean variable for name order - although it's not exactly that simple - see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NameOrderConfusion for a good summary - so a "Preferred name" custom field might be better.