Standardizing country information: Easier said than done

At first glance, standardizing country information seems like a straightforward task. After all, how complicated can it be to manage country codes and names? However, once you start diving into the complexities—multiple users, various languages, diacritics, and more—it becomes clear that this process is far from simple.

What if Germany has a different name for France than France does because of language barriers between German and French? (They do. The name “France” in German is “Frankreich,” but “France” in French is “France.”) This happens all the time.

The challenge of exonyms and endonyms

Exo-whaaaa? An exonym occurs when different languages have their own names for other countries. For example, those of us who live in the USA call Germany “Germany.” That’s not what the natives call it, but we don’t mainly speak German over here, so that’s our English-a-tized version of the name (our exonym). 

An endonym is the name that people who live in a place refer to that place in their own language. Endonyms are the names native people call their own country in their language. For example, in Italy, Italians will refer to their country as Italia. They aren’t wrong in what they’re naming their own country. To say so would be nuts. 

What we are saying, though, is that to standardize your information so that all of the Italian addresses in your dataset show up in the same section of your spreadsheet and are searchable by country, you need to have a comprehensive strategy for matching countries within an address - Smarty®  can help.

One of the biggest hurdles in country standardization is the inconsistency in how countries are named across different languages and regions. When users enter country information in their own language, in order to keep your information standardized and clean, your system must be capable of interpreting and standardizing these diverse inputs.

Consider Germany once more. Depending on the language or region, Germany is referred to as "Deutschland," "Alemania," "Tyskland," "Allemagne," "Germania," "Niemcy," "Duitsland," "Saksa," and many other names. (Don’t even get us started on Klingon). 

Anybody who doesn’t know any better might mistakenly categorize each of these country names as a separate place. Managing these variations requires sophisticated technology to ensure that all references to Germany, or any other place for that matter, are recognized as their standardized country version.

Diacritics and the complexity of country codes

Another layer of complexity arises with diacritics—accent marks used in various languages. Some countries use diacritics in their official, native names, while others don’t. 

This difference can create challenges when standardizing country names. For example, "México" includes a diacritic, while "Mexico" the version we write in the United States of America, doesn’t. Similarly, "Côte d'Ivoire" includes diacritics that might be ignored in some systems, leading to mismatches in data entry.

Here’s what Smarty can do to simplify the mess

Our system is strict—make no mistake about that. But we have trained it to detect humanness in our data. We do have a list of “Here’s how you should standardize addresses,” but if you get messy address info from a client, form fills, or data aggregation, Smarty can also be very… well… smart. 

Here are the ways that we’re trying to simplify the complexity of country standardizing:

• We parse through the input of the country field to determine the best value.
• Endonyms and exonyms are recognized
• Diacritics are recognized
• Some users don’t know the country code, but they do know the ISO numeric version. 
  • For example, if “214” is being pulled by a user, it will be standardized as “DMA.”
• We saved the best for last, but Smarty can also add exceptions to the rules to help those of us who struggle with typing and spelling.
  •  For example, maybe you get a user who loves using caps lock and absolutely despises the space button. They enter “HONGKONGSPECIALADMINREGIONOFCHINA.” Woof. However, have no fear—we know that what they really meant (in the most standardized sense) was this: “HKG.”

Now you know…

You know that standardizing country information is actually a very highly nuanced process and that it’s not as easy as it might first appear. You also know that the brilliant developers at Smarty work tirelessly to make it easier. So the question remains: what are you going to do about it?

You could talk to an address expert or check out our full suite of address tools to see how Smarty can help you get cleaner, more accurate data. Chat soon.