{"id":4055,"date":"2011-03-02T19:18:42","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T11:18:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/?p=4055"},"modified":"2011-03-02T19:50:41","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T11:50:41","slug":"bing-maps-for-taiwan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pinyin.info\/news\/2011\/bing-maps-for-taiwan\/","title":{"rendered":"Bing Maps for Taiwan"},"content":{"rendered":"

The maps of Taiwan put out by GooGle<\/a> are plagued with errors in their use of Pinyin. But what about that other<\/em> big company with deep pockets? You know: Microsoft. How good a job does Microsoft’s Bing do with its maps of Taiwan?
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I won’t keep y’all waiting: After examining Bing’s maps of Taiwan the two words that came first to mind were incompetent<\/em> and atrocious<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The country-level map is odd, offering Wade-Giles. And although the use of the hyphen is irregular, I will give Bing points for getting at least Wade-Giles’ apostrophes<\/a> right. So, although some place names on the map are decades<\/em> out of date (e.g., Hsin-chuang, Chungli, Chunan, Kuang-fu), at least they’re not horribly misspelled within that system. <\/p>\n

It’s at the street level that Bing’s weirdness becomes most apparent. For example, below is part of Bing’s map of Banqiao<\/a>. <\/p>\n

I added the highlighting. <\/p>\n

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This tiny but representative fragment of the map has not one but four<\/em> romanization systems:<\/p>\n