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If a system does not possess the ability to capture, store, and retrieve people names, according to their cultural requirements, it is less likely to be accepted on the international market. Internationalisation of people names could prevent a person s name being lost in a system, avoiding frustration, saving time, and possibly money. This is a study that attempts to determine the extent to which the human name can be internationalised, based upon published anthroponymic data for 148 locales, by categorising them into eleven distinctly autonomous parts. It attempts to provide an evaluation of the effectiveness of internationalising people names; examining the challenges of terminology conflicts, the impact of subjectivity whilst pigeonholing personyms, and the consequences of decisions made. The cultural variety of human names can be expressed with the Locale Data Mark-up Language for 74% of the world s countries. Spanning 1,919 anthroponymic syntactic structures, software developers, localisation engineers, and database administrators can benefit, through recognition of this problem, and understanding the potential gains from accurately handling people names within a system.

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Gary is a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin with CNGL the Centre for Global Intelligent Content. He is Cisco´s Internationalisation Architect, a Master of Science in Multilingual Computing and Localisation at the Localisation Research Centre, a fellow of the Royal Institute, and a seasoned globalisation evangelist, consultant and educator.

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