I'm not talking about cities your country has historical connections to, because those obviously have their own unique name.
I'm talking about foreign cities far away.
In Hungarian for example we call Cape Town Fokváros, which is the literal translation. We also translate certain Central American capital cities (Mexikóváros, Panamaváros, Guatemalaváros).
We also translate New Delhi to Újdelhi, but strangely enough we don't translate New York, New Orleans or other "New" cities in the USA.
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Not really, no. We tend to use some approximation of the local or steal it from English
We translate Nyíregyháza as Mestecănești.
In Polish it really depends on how often any given city is mentioned in our news.
For example we have Polish language versions of some really important global cities, like Nowy Jork (New York), Waszyngton (Washington), Meksyk (Mexico), Pekin (Beijing), Stambuł (Istanbul) etc. But at the same time our linguistic authorities from Rada Języka Polskiego usually recommend to use form closest to how local people call their cities etc., so it will be rather Phoenix instead of Feniks for example.
They are translated into Croatian only if it was historically significant for the country (or are really famous like Paris – Pariz, but this is also not always right – New York is still New York). For example Vienna – Beč, or Pécs – Pečuh.
But other cities, no, Reykjavik or Marseille would be written exactly like that.
Edit: I’m stupid and just reread your post. There are cities far away as well that we have changed the name: Beijing – Peking, Al-Qāhirah – Kairo, Shanghai – Šangaj.
In Swedish it’s *Kapstaden* for (the) Cape Town. That’s also the only capital city name that’s been translated into Swedish.
>but strangely enough we don’t translate New York, New Orleans or other “New” cities in the USA
And we do translate New Mexico to Új-Mexikó while not translating the three other “new” states.
Kappanhágó Istókhalma madafaka
in Spanish, we say Nueva York… We do translate the “new” part. We use the feminine variant of the adjective because city in Spanish is feminine (I think this is the reason why we say nueva instead of nuevo). Spanish tends to translate names even for example Oregon… like the state in the USA we say “Oregón” we put the acute accent in the o
It’s a bit of a mix.
As a general rule if the city/country is influential in our history/news/culture/etc, then the name will often be translated into Italian. But there are also a lot of instances where that isn’t the case.
For example in Germany we’ve got Brema, Dresda, Lipsia, Francoforte, etc with an Italian name, and then Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Hanover with the German one.
In Spain we’ve got Barcellona and Siviglia with Italian names, while Madrid and Valencia are left with untranslated names.
In France Parigi, Marsiglia, Lione, Nizza, etc and then Bordeaux, Montpellier, Nantes, etc
And the list goes on.
So while there’s somewhat of a trend where more famous = higher likelihood of having a translated name, there’s still no definite rule.
For english there a couple of trends i would say.
First literal translations are rare like cape town and mexico city
Countries we have long historical connections too that also share similarities in language mostly have anglicised versions of there name as is the case with most of europe. So we usually get the germanic names the closest.
Lots of colonial era names for places are slowly being replaced in places like india with the name used by the people there
Cities which probably arent that well known or hard to pronounce for us often get the best phonetic aproximation with our alphabet we can do, look at chinese cities for these i would say.
In Dutch we don’t translate Cape Town, we use the original name Kaapstad, which means Cape City
In German it’s the same for the most part.
Ciudad de México = Mexiko-Stadt
Cape Town = Kapstadt
New Delhi = Neu-Delhi
But:
New York = New York
Some cities have a German name that is not a literal translation, those are widely used instead of the native one:
København = Kopenhagen
Beograd = Belgrad
Roma = Rom
Milano = Mailand
Venezia = Venedig
Moskva = Moskau
Some have a historical German name but those are rarely used nowadays:
Márosvasarhely / Târgu Mureș = Neumarkt am Mieresch
Brassó / Brașov = Kronstadt
Székesfehérvár = Stuhlweißenburg (still used since maybe 0.1% of Germans can pronounce the native name correctly)
Gdańsk = Danzig (still used, but not because we want it back but because Gdańsk is too hard to pronounce)
Ljubljana = Laibach (still used in Austria)
Zagreb = Agram (still used in Austria)
Nobody uses them anymore, but in olden texts (16th-17th century) you will find three cities in Spanish referred to as Nápoles (Naples in Spanish):
Nápoles de Italia (Naples), Nápoles de Romania (Nafplio), and Nápoles de África (Nabeul, Tunisia)
Sometimes. Used to be more common until the 20th century, and some names stuck until today. Some didn’t.
Similar to your examples, Cape Town is still called Kapstadt, and the Central American cities are translated.
But nobody has called New York Neuyork for a long time. Don’t know if it ever was very common, but I saw it in a 1890s atlas once. Newfoundland on the other hand, is often translated.
It seems pretty random.
I can’t really think of many. My favorite is Schweinfurt – “Svinibrod” (both lit. Pig Ford), a small town in Germany.
Cape Town would be Kapské Město which is ~~pretty weird since a cape is “mys” in Czech so it’s not fully translated.~~ an actual translation and I suck at Czech.
Same thing with “Nové Dhilí” but New York, New Orleans etc. But we don’t translate the Spanish ones, usually you would just say that the capital of “Mexiko” is “Mexiko” or Ciudad de México if you wanted to be fancy.
Some names can be extremely different but they aren’t really translations and/or are related, like Genoa – “Janov”, Graz – “(Štýrský) Hradec”, Roma – “Řím”, Paris – “Paříž” etc.
In Italy, Pechino Is Beijing, Varsavia Is Warsaw. I’m sure there are more, I just can’t think of them.
But not all. I want to say all English names remain the same.
In general, no. We use the original name. Exceptions are cities that were culturally close or relevant. Ie, vienna is beč, trieste is trst, etc.
If the name has an immediately recognisable geographical or other modifier, the modifier might be translated and, e.g. **Νέα** Υόρκη (**New** York), **Ανατολικό** Σαράγεβο (**Istočno** Sarajevo), **Βόρεια** Ρηνανία-Βεστφαλία (
**Nord**rhein-Westfalen).
If the designation is not recognisable, it will become a fully phonetic loanword, e.g. Ιλ-ντε-Φρανς (*Île*-de-France), Νόρλαντ (*Norr*land), Νοϊμπράντενμπουργκ (*Neu*brandenburg).
Cape Town falls into the second category, and it’s phonetically loaned as Κέιπ Τάουν.
You might be dissatisfied that this is not a hard and fast rule. There’s many factors at play, from historical relations to some adjectives being more recognisable than others, to simple chance.
Not really no. not for far away cities.
Some older people will call Cape Town “Kapstaden”, but it is not the most common phrase.
Translating city names mostly occur in formerly danish places such as calling Trondheim Trondhjem, or calling Nuuk Godthåb, but i think that is also mostly older people. And of course basically all the cities in Slesvig are still referred to by their Danish names in Denmark.
most cities are just the same but with a different spelling and pronounciation.
Only cities in Europe have local names in Romanian. Like London=Londra, Wien=Viena, Budapest=Budapesta, Athens=Atena, Nice=Nisa, Warsaw=Varșovia, Prague=Praga, etc. But for non-European ones we pretty much use the international name.
In France we call Cape Town “Le Cap”
In Irish you say Nua Eabhrac for New York, San Francisco is is just San Francisco it isn’t San Proinsias or anything and New Orleans is just New Orleans
No. German keeps most of the names as they are, some are slightly altered, though.
Roma -> Rom (and some other places in Italy, like Torino -> Turin)
Lisboa -> Lissabon
Dimas -> Damaskus
All English, , Dutch, Scandinavian, French and Spanish city names stay the same. I don’t speak or know about Russian and Arab languages
In Serbian, we don’t translate stuff like new or city, but we do write foreign names and cities in Serbian exactly how we hear them.
Cape Town = Kejptaun
New York = Njujork
Mexico City = Meksiko Siti
Jaipur = Džajpur
Szczesin = Ščećin
Seattle = Sijetl
And so on and on.
Edit: Spacing between cities
We generally don’t translate or change city names. We used to use a Scandinavian version of many city names in the past, but in the late 19th century/early 20th century, the Norwegian language underwent a lot of changes in order to differentiate it as much as possible from Danish (which had been the written standard in Norway for centuries).
One of those changes was removing the Danish names of cities (both foreign and Norwegian cities, e.g. Christiania became Oslo again) and replacing them with the local name. For example, Rom became Roma, Venedig became Venezia, Prag became Praha, Lissabon became Lisboa, Bukarest became București etc. I can’t think of any cities that don’t use the (latin alphabetized) local language name in Norwegian.
This was also done with some countries, like Grekenland becoming Hellas, Holland becoming Nederland, Italien becoming Italia, Romanien becoming Romania, Letland becoming Latvia etc.
There are some fun exonyms between French and English, such as the French cities of Paris and Reims and the town of Cherbourg, which are pronounced in English as if they were written in English (though Calais isn’t). In the opposite direction, there’s Dublin, which is pronounced in French as if it were a French word.
My favourite, though, is New York, which in French is hyphenated: New-York.
It’s definitely an interesting concept, i wish we had more of that in Swedish. For example, som literal translations of American cities could be:
New York – Nyjorvik
Los Angeles – Änglarna
Washington – Vasketuna
San Diego – Sankt Jakob
Las Vegas – Stjärnorna
Philadelphia – Broderskärlek
We’re used to the vast majority of placenames in Ireland having a name in each of the national languages, which are sometimes very close, sometimes translations, and sometimes completely unrelated. I suspect that this means that we’re more likely to accept that we *can* change names, so we’re comfortable with the idea that the names of foreign cities don’t always match what the locals call them, whereas people from more monolingual countries may be more likely to feel that a name is a name and shouldn’t change.
In greek we have
Paris = Παρίσι (Parísi)
Berlin = Βερολίνο (Verolíno)
Moscow = Μόσχα (Moskha)
Rome = Ρώμη (Rómi)
The biggest difference would obviously be… Constantinople
Not really.
We’ve got différents names for a few cities (like Londres for London), but the only one we translate I can think of is New Orléans, which we call La Nouvelle Orléans.
We call Cape Town Kapsztad, which is a transliteration of its Dutch name. And we translate “New” cities to “Nowy/Nowa/Nowe”, so it’s Nowe Delhi, Nowy Jork and Nowy Orlean.
Transliterations and/or alternate forms (usually from another language) are the vast majority of the “changed” names of foreign cities. So, for example, Beijing is Pekin (from an older transcription), Chisinau is Kiszyniów (from Russian) and Washington is Waszyngton. If a city has a name that fits Polish or is, for lack of a better word, irrelevant to Poland, it’s left unchanged. So Australia’s Cranberry is still Canberra (even though it should be Kanbera), Burundi’s Gitega is still Gitega (because it fits Polish), and Chile’s Santiago is still Santiago.
Some places are almost identical, other ones are completely different. This especially applies to country names.
For example, Montenegro is *Montenegras*, but Ivory Coast is *Dramblio Kaulo Krantas*, because that’s what it means.
They are not translated, but countries are. For example we say new for new york but translate the new in new zealand
Oh, we have so many.
Cape town: Höfðaborg
Copenhagen: Kaupmannahöfn
Bergen: Björgvin
Rouen: Rúðuborg (window-pane city)
Shetland Islands: Hjaltlandseyjar
Århus: Árósar
Cape Verde: Grænhöfðaeyjar
Montenegro: Svartfjallaland
Kiev: Kænugarður
London: Lundúnir
USA: Bandaríkin
This isn’t even close to being all of them
Cities that had a Greek name at some point in the past, often yes. Istanbul, Marseille, Nice, Izmir, Izmit, Syracuse, Alexandria, Plovdiv (these are not their Greek names, obviously). But for some reason, Naples, Catania, and Antibes are notable exceptions.
Cities that have a historical connection, but *not* a Greek name, usually yes: Rome, Venice are two examples.
More specific to your question:
Cities with no historic connection, but are near, often yes: Madrid (Μαδρίτη/Madríti), Barcelona (Βαρκελώνη/Varkelóni), Sevilla (Σεβίλλη/Sevílli), Berlin (Βερολίνο/Verolíno), London (Λονδίνο/Londíno), Paris (Παρίσι/Parísi), Moscow (Μόσχα/Móscha), St Petersburg (Αγία Πετρούπολη/Agía Petroúpoli), Copenhagen (Κοπεγχάγη/Kopegchági), most major European cities and also major MENA cities on the Mediterranean coast: Beirut (Βηρυτός/Viritós), Algiers (Αλγέρι/Algéri).
Cities further away: Usually no. But some yes: Beijing (Πεκίνο/Pekíno), New York (Νέα Υόρκη/Néa Yórki), Boston (Βοστώνη/Vostóni), Baltimore (Βαλτιμόρη/Valtimóri), New Delhi (Νέο Δελχί/Néo Delchí). It’s rare, but it happens.