[dev_snd]

It would be awesome if there was a mode in which the pronunciation of the names is also same in the two languages.

For example, in french there is the name "Arnaud", which exists in German as "Arno". For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.

[MattGaiser]

> For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same.

There are downsides to the different spellings.

I have this issue within English. There are several ways to Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally, some spell it Mathieu.

I hate to use phones for any kind of personal info transfer for this reason, as it has caused headaches everywhere from the bank to travel agents to charitable donations to even sharing my email.

[thaumasiotes]

> I have this issue within English. There are several ways to Matthew. If misspelled, it is usually Matthew. Occasionally, some spell it Mathieu.

For Michael, there is only one spelling, but people nevertheless frequently misspell the name.

My favorite comment on this topic came from a Michael who, when consulted about the spelling Micheal, observed "people named Michael don't spell it that way".

[dragonwriter]

> My favorite comment on this topic came from a Michael who, when consulted about the spelling Micheal, observed "people named Michael don't spell it that way".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micheal

[kalleboo]

> For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same

Maybe when they're a child, but once they become an adult, having the same spelling becomes important to avoid bureaucratic headaches, especially now that KYC is becoming so strict. Are you sending money to yourself or someone else when the name is spelled differently on the two accounts?

[lucb1e]

Took me a while to understand, so to make it explicit for anyone else:

Arnaud and Arno sound the same! (in this language pair.) In Dutch, I know both an Arnaud and an Arno, and it's pronounced correctly^W like you read it (IPA: /ɑrnʌud/ and /ɑrnoː/) so that threw me off probably.

Anyway, your request is a bunch of human labeling work if there isn't already IPA conversions for every name (and if LLM can't already guess correctly 95% of the time and that's good enough for an initial comparison), but from an algorithmic standpoint shouldn't be hard: use the same comparison but on phonetic spellings of the names rather than language-specific spellings. Example: in Dutch, we pronounce "u" like IPA /y/, whereas German pronounces it as /ü/, so any name with "u" in it will automatically be incompatible pronunciation-wise.

[ajmurmann]

"For a bilingual child it's much more important for the name to sound the same that to be written the same."

This feels like it will be annoying whenever someone asks for your name in order to write it down or when they are trying to read it. This happens a lot in a school context.

[OJFord]

You're only at school in one of the countries (at a time anyway) - pick the one that corresponds there?

Of course only one of them is your 'actual' name anyway, the other is just by its existence making your name familiar and easy to pronounce. It having a different local spelling (if that's the case) doesn't have to matter or be annoying unless you decide it is. Anything where it's important obviously you make sure to get it right, as you would anyway.

[prpl]

This is my Wife’s dream, but it is usually never born out.

Even simple names, like somebody mentioned Maria, can sound different enough to be annoying in the right parts of the country.

[User23]

Contrariwise in English/German you have names like Michael which are the same name but pronounced quite differently.