katakana version of city names?

[MeryllB]

Hello!

I don't know if any of you have met this problem before, but whenever I am trying to write in Japanese the name of a city that is not extremely famous, I am in for a world of pain, as my own katakana approximation never seems to be right.
If finding the proper katakana version of places like New York City or Paris doesn't pose too much of a problem, it's definitely not the same for smaller places (I am currently looking for Metz -France, and Sarrebrucken -Germany).
Would anyone know of a good Japanese online atlas, or a good website that would provide a list of the world's cities in katakana?

Thank you for the help!

 

[SpiceMan]

I don't know any list of cities, but I could find out that Metz is メス and Saarbrücken is ザールブリュッケン.

To find out, I went to wikipedia, for instance the article about Saarbrücken in French, and click on 日本語 on the list of wikipedias in other languages that is on the left.
Sometimes there's no article available on the Japanese version, though.

 

[MeryllB]

Thanks for the tip, Spiceman!
You seem to be full of ressources (dunno if this expression makes any sense in English, never seen it before but I figured I could give it a go and transpose it from French...)

 

[Aoyama]

That is a problem. For some cities that are not "known", the translator's guess is as good as anything else (as they say).
A good example of that can be found when boarding Air France and looking at the on-flight map that is supposed to show the progression of the flight "real time". When the plane approaches Paris, here are a few "pearls" that can be found (obviously, those who translated/transcribed those city names had poor knowledge of ...geography) :
- Amiens = アミンス
- Reims = レイムス
- Lille = リレ
many others ... The list is long. That thing has being going on for as long as this thing (on-flight air-map) exists. I told Air France (repeatedly) about that, to no avail. Errare humanum est , sed perseverare diabolicum ...

 

[Flaminius]

Could the tenacity be supported by a motive of disambiguation? At least in case of Reims, calling it レイムス can be a practical loophole to avoid confusion with Lens (which is ランス too). But I am not sure how this disambiguation is of any use....

Most atlases in print are more scruplous. I know a professor of Slavic languages being requested by a map publisher to make transciption rules for them when they decided to use Belorussian pronunciations for Belorussian place names after Soviet Union collapsed and Russian was no longer the official language there. Then again, they often resort to countrified transcription such as タンヌ・ツーバ instead of タンヌ・トゥーヴァ, which I don't quite understand.

 

[Aoyama]

Could the tenacity be supported by a motive of disambiguation? At least in case of Reims, calling it レイムス can be a practical loophole to avoid confusion with Lens (which is ランス too).

For the disambiguation business, this would lending to their (the folks who did the job) ignorance too much credit, I dare think . For Lens and Reims, you have a point somewhere, but this point does not appear on that on-flight map ... I don't remember the other examples but some are really hilarious.