Talk:München Hauptbahnhof

Assessment logic

Category 1 station (of international importance) - one of only 20 in Germany.

Article title

It's pretty standard to call the city "Munich" in English, so I suggest moving the article. The station's web site uses "Munich main station". DPA, the main German news agency, says "Munich's main railway station. So does AP, the main U.S. news agency. Kauffner (talk) 14:49, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Normally we use "Central Station" in English, although I accept that "Main Station" is a common translation too, probably because "Haupt-" literally means "Main...". See Nuremberg Central Station which was renamed recently. --Bermicourt (talk) 16:38, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

The article is now back at the real name, following the extensive discussions at Talk:Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, Talk:Kaiserslautern Hauptbahnhof, Talk:Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Talk:Zürich Hauptbahnhof, Talk:Praha hlavní nádraží which supported the use of the common names used in reliable sources, rather than sometimes controversial attempts at devising translations. This also provides consistency with all the other stations in the city which have articles under their real names. See also Railteam's München Hauptbahnhof page, etc. Wheeltapper (talk) 20:50, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

A translation isn't "false" or "unreal". RGloucester — ☎ 16:17, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

That depends on how good the translation is. And translating Hauptbahnhof to Central Station is, at best, sloppy. Hauptbahnhof speaks to importance, whilst Central Station speaks to geography. — chris_j_wood (talk) 18:21, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't referring to Hauptbahnhof particularly, which I don't mind at all. I'm more concerned with the disdain for the correct English name of the city, Munich. RGloucester — ☎ 22:34, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree it is absurd not translating the names of Munich or Cologne in the title of stations or lines.—Grahame (talk) 00:24, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I see no reason why the city names should not be termed as they are in English. I can understand the reasoning behind not translating Hauptbahnhof, however that reasoning is based on the fact that there isn't a well-used and easily understandable alternative. In English, we do not call Vienna "Wien" ever, nor Munich "München". There is no valid reasoning for maintaining foreign city names that English speakers do not use, and sometimes cannot pronounce, when there is a valid English language alternative that is commonly used. RGloucester — ☎ 00:27, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

The issue is not the name of the city, it is the name of the station within the city. There is an article on Whittlesea railway station (station name) in Whittlesey (place name). I see Wikipedia has FC Bayern Munich, following common usage for the organisation rather than pure logic for the place names (not everyone knows that Bayern is just German for Bavaria). Does worrying about correct pronunciation really matter in a written medium: we have articles on Leigh railway station/Leigh, Greater Manchester or Versailles, Ohio/Gare de Versailles-Chantiers without problems. Wheeltapper (talk) 13:11, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

I agree that we should use Munich rather that München when used in isolation. And it sounds like there is little contention right now with Hauptbahnhof rather than Main Station (although that has been contentious in the past). I think the question is therefore is it ok to put the two together to make the linguistic hybrid Munich Hauptbahnhof. I confess to being torn two ways over this. -- chris_j_wood (talk) 14:15, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

A hybrid is more acceptable than using a city name that isn't used in English, and very well could confuse readers. Wheeltapper, I don't really understand what you don't understand about this. English speakers DO NOT use the word "München", ever. They do not use "Wien" ever. Never do they used these words. These words are simply NOT USED in any context in the English language. The idea of a dichotomy between the "name of the city" and "the name of the a station within the city" is a totally false one. It fact, it may produce the perception that the station isn't even in the city at all, but some other one. Sure, the article explains that, however the title should accurately reflect what is contained within. At present, it does not.

The Whittlesea/sey example you keep bringing up is irrelevant. The station and the town actually have different names in that case. In this case, the name of the city is the same, whether in German or in English. In German, it is say Wien or München, and in English it is Vienna or Munich. There is no inconsistency, as in that case, and we should not artificially create one.

As far as a hybrid goes, I think that a hybrid is acceptable because Hauptbahnhof has been accepted into English many cases, and is used in discourse. Not to mention that the translation difficulty presents a valid reason. There is no translation difficulty with "Munich/München". RGloucester — ☎ 14:55, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

By the way, hybrid forms of this sort have precedent on Wikipedia. See, for example, Munich S-Bahn and Munich U-Bahn. Why should this article differ from those two? RGloucester — ☎ 16:26, 11 December 2013 (UTC)

What would be the best way to solve this issue? Propose a requested move for all Hauptbahnhofs in cities with commonly or exclusively used English names? I'm not sure how best to go about it. RGloucester — ☎ 16:44, 12 December 2013 (UTC)

We seem to be trying to solve a problem which doesn't really exist.

Is the perceived problem that:

1) English-speakers might not be able to pronounce the real name as a local would.

2) The city itself is usually referred to differently, and so anything relating to the city should have the name changed to match?

If 1) I'm not sure what we can do about that. English-speaking countries are littered with place names which are not obvious. What about Welsh language names? Should we use Stettin and Breslau because English speakers can pronounce those more easily than their current names? If 2), does it matter? We do have reliable sources like Today's Railways and Railway Gazette and the late lamented Thos Cook Timetable which use the real names for the stations. If we decide we have to anglicise, would Leipzig Bayerischer Bahnhof become Leipzig Bavaria station, a name which isn't used but reflects the exonym for Bayern? Wheeltapper (talk) 14:31, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

The city is not "usually referred to differently". It is ALWAYS referred to as Vienna or Munich. This is the English-speaking Wikipedia, and we use the names that are common in English, so place-names in English-speaking countries that are commonly used are also used here. We do not use Stettin, or Breslau, or Posen, or Danzig, because those names are no longer commonly used to refer to the cities except in a historical context, since they are now under Polish rule. Anyone trying to move Poznań to Posen would fail, because Posen is not the unquestionable common name for the city anymore. However, in the cases I'm talking about, Vienna, Munich, Cologne and so on, these are the only names used to refer to the cities in English. It is UNQUESTIONABLE, that these are the commonly used English-speaking names of the cities.

We would not translate "Bayerischer", that would be a seperate discussion. This is only referring to stations in cities with English names. By the way, these names are no "less real". For an English speaker, they are more real than "Wien". RGloucester — ☎ 16:00, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Not always; usually, yes, but there are examples of the local name being used. However we are not talking about the cities, we are talking about the stations, which are referred to by reliable sources using the real name (in purely practical terms this makes sense; people can't buy a ticket or catch a train to "<English name of city> Hbf"). "<Station name> is a station in <English name of city>" is a trivially-verifiable fact; "<English name of city> Hauptbahnhof" is more problematic. Why is Bayerischer different, and what criteria would we use for deciding when to translate names? Wheeltapper (talk) 22:37, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

There are no examples of the German names being used in common English-speaking parlance, except maybe in some specialist usages that do not apply here. What reliable sources? In English-speaking reliable sources, if it is mentioned at all, there are a variety of possible options. As I linked at the Vienna Hbf page, OBB refers to that station as Vienna Central Station, despite the fact that the translation is off, as do other sources. Sources variously refer to Munich Hauptbahnhof, Munich main railway station, Munich central station, and the city of Munich's English-language website refers to it a "Munich train station". People can buy tickets to Munich Hauptbahnhof if they want to, and they can also buy them to "Munich main railway station", if the website of RailEurope is to be believed. I'm sure if you went to a ticket office in Munich, you could ask for a ticket to Vienna, even if Germans don't call Vienna "Vienna". That's not the concern.

I'm only talking, for this moment, about the various Hbfs that were recently moved. That's why "Bayerischer" is different, because it is not one of those. That would be dealt with separately. RGloucester — ☎ 23:14, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

But the name of almost any railway station actually is a specialist usage. There are cited examples of the real name being used in magazines, websites etc: Today's Railways is dead-tree based, but Railway Gazette has München Hauptbahnhof on its website. DB's official page for this station is Station profile > München Hbf. The Railteam website uses München Hauptbahnhof and also uses the normal names for other major stations (see the drop-down list), rather than try to translate them. I've just asked DB's English-language website for Munich Hauptbahnhof to Vienna Hauptbahnhof, and it doesn't recognise either one as a station.

It would surely be a little odd for Wikipedia to have different naming policies for stations called Hbf and for stations called something else.

As an aside, come the revolution there will be section of wall reserved for everyone who uses the term "train station"! Wheeltapper (talk) 18:39, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

It isn't a matter of naming policy. Wikipedia is a pragmatic website. We name through pragmatism. The railway station is in Munich, hence it is Munich railway station. There is no argument against that. Usage is diverse, as I said, but Munich is always the name for Munich. RGloucester — ☎ 21:39, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Article titles, along with WP:Verify and WP:reliablesource, which provide a strong argument against that. Also note that there is more than one station in Munich. What is the railway station in Norton-on-Derwent called? Or the main station in Ho Chi Minh City? Or the station in Whittlesey? Is Austerlitz station in Slavkov u Brna? Wheeltapper (talk) 22:52, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

I totally disagree. Wikipedia:Article titles does not provide evidence for the view that station names should not be translated into English, this is a matter of style. The fact that some rail magazines choose as part of their house style not to use the commonly used English names of cities does not mean that this is Wikipedia's style. Wikipedia's preference has always been to translate names if a common English name exists. The only relevance that WP:Verify and WP:reliablesource have is in establishing whether these alternative names for cities are still in common use. It would be used for instance to establish whether Mayence Hauptbahnhof was preferable to Mainz Hauptbahnhof.—Grahame (talk) 23:50, 16 December 2013 (UTC)

Exactly. RGloucester — ☎ 03:59, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

WP:Commonname provides evidence that we should follow what WP:reliablesources do, rather than what we might think they ought to do. In the absence of evidence that an "English" name is actually used in good sources such as the serious media, it would seem odd to introduce the ambiguity that devising one would create.

As far as I can tell pretty much all railway stations are in Wikipedia under the common name of the actual station, rather than the English exonym for the location: examples include Roma Termini railway station, Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station, Antwerpen-Centraal railway station, Gare de Lyon-Perrache, Gare de Dunkerque, Praha hlavní nádraží (note the discussion), Gent-Sint-Pieters railway station, Vlissingen railway station, Hoek van Holland Strand railway station. In my experience of the real world, when the situation arises people do use the "real" names for the stations. Wheeltapper (talk) 00:20, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Just because the status quo exists does not mean it is correct. There is no such thing as a "real name". I even presented to you links that OBB uses "Vienna Central Station", and yet you contest that various forms of the name are used. RGloucester — ☎ 00:26, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

It is nonsense to say that most English speakers visiting Florence call Florence station Firenze Santa Maria Novella railway station or Prague station Praha hlavní nádraží (which they can't pronounce). This is an obsession of trainspotters. Sinilarly English speakers do not call Frankfurt Airport Flughafen Frankfurt am Main and Wikipedia does use such names for airports.—Grahame (talk) 01:34, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Exactly. And it is much worse with Prague main railway station, as there most English speakers won't be familiar with Czech orthography at all, unlike Romance and Germanic languages… RGloucester — ☎ 04:34, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

A couple of years ago I came to this debate from a neutral standpoint. As a German speaker I was of course familiar with the word Hauptbahnhof and German city names like München, but noticed an inconsistency in the Wikipedia naming of German stations: we have "Foostadt railway station" and "Fooburg Hauptbahnnhof". So I researched what the equivalent English name might be. The literal meaning of Hauptbahnhof is of course "Main Station", but I discovered that there are virtually no examples of this usage in English-speaking countries. But "Foo Central Station" is common and is used in an almost identical way - for the primary station of a city. Further research revealed that several other European countries use "Central" in a similar way to name stations and that, in the early days, Germany used the term Zentralbahnhof before Hauptbahnhof became the norm. Interestingly, the colossal Muret-Sanders German-English dictionary translates Hauptbahnhof as either "main station" or "central station". Finally internet research revealed that, for the better known German Hauptbahnhöfe, "Foo Central Station" was the most common English name, often outnumbering English sources that use the German name, and that major players like DB and ÖBB use "Foo Central Station" in their English literature. The literal translation "Foo Main Station" came a rather poor second IIRC in almost all cases.

Just to give a flavour (and this is not rigorous), the results on googlehits/googlebooks for this article give:

• Munich Central Station: 1,150,000 and 1470
• München Hauptbahnhof: 180,000 and 2030 (includes German sources of course, so this is too high)
• Munich Hauptbahnhof: 23,200 and 695
• Munich Main Station: 22,700 and 613

However, in a rather emotive debate, I was unable to persuade other editors that, whilst Foo Hauptbahnhof was not utterly wrong, we ought to use "Foo Central Station" on grounds of WP:CLARITY, WP:USEENGLISH and, in many cases, WP:COMMONNAME too. Wheeltapper strongly opposes this view and has sought to eradicate almost all instances of "Central Station" even in the text.

I don't think the current naming schema will change unless several editors work together to research the sources and can to put a strong, well-evidenced case together. However, I do think there is a perfectly good case to include "Foo Central Station" naming in the lede and I think we could start there. So, for example, the lede here should IMHO say something like "München Hauptbahnhof or Munich Central Station is the primary railway station in Munich...". Hope that helps. --Bermicourt (talk) 19:12, 9 June 2014 (UTC)

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