Wednesday, September 28, 2011

New romanization list from DOPA

As a matter of coincidence, just one day after I posted on the strange wrong romanization of Thap Khlo district, I noticed that the Department of Provincial Administration had put a new file on their website containing a new list of transcriptions. The link is titled นามสงเคราะห์ส่วนราชการ ชื่ออำเภอ จังหวัด และตำแหน่งของปค.ภาษาอังกฤษ, which translates as "Glossary of official English names of Provinces, Districts and Positions in DOPA". Thus there are all the district and province names in English, confirming that Thap Khlo was spelled wrong in earlier publications, as well as the romanization guessed for the new district in Chiang Mai being Galyani Vadhana, following the late princess' English name and not the RTGS transcription scheme. As the title of the link suggests, the romanization of the district and province names are only one part of the document, the recommended translations of positions as well as structures within the provincial administration are an equally useful second part. I have already gone through my own glossary of terms to update the English names, Somewhat strange is the name of the head of a minor district, which is supposed to be "Minor Chief District Officer", which IMHO should better be "Chief Minor District Officer". Its however academic currently anyway, as there are no minor districts right now. Only missing in this list are the chumchon, which I would translate as borough. Only thing still missing is a new updated and corrected version of the subdistrict name transcriptions, which should also include the municipalities.

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