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Latest comment: 7 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Why not commence the article with "Black River" rather than with "Negro River"? The former is an accurate translation of the Spanish "Río Negro", the latter -- which (to American readers, at least) is freighted with inappropriate (and unhappy) racial overtones -- is not. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Firstorm (talk • contribs) 2 May 2007 (UTC)
The fact that Negro is a racist term in English (especially US) has no relevance for the Spanish term where it simply means black (the only widely used word for it too). As a consequence, there are a huge number of places with this word in parts of the world where Spanish (or Portuguese) is the main language spoken. See Rio Negro. Since these names have no connection to the racist term (named after water colour, nothing to do with people), forced translations are generally not used. If the names had been related to humans, the relevant policy would be WP:NPOVNAME. RN1970 (talk) 16:49, 14 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
I speak Spanish and thus understand your point completely. Nevertheless, Wikipedia seems in actual usage to favor translations of proper names (as, for example, in entitling biographical articles on German nobility of the eighteenth century, the names generally are given not in original form but in English translation -- and German is a kindred tongue to English while Spanish is not). As a Spanish-speaker, I certainly understand your own point that "negro" in application to "Black River" has nothing beyond color to do with "negro" in application to "black-skinned" people. However, living in the United States, I certainly see apparently willful ignorance increasing daily (I have, for instance, heard a man who spoke of another's "niggardliness" berated for his "bigoted language"!). Wikipedia appears to accommodate ignorance and provincialism (as I have implicitly noted above), so we might follow the custom here if we at least translate "Río Negro" (which, as you've stated, means "Black River" and not "Negro River").
However, the whole matter is a decade old, and I no longer have spirit for arguing for scholarly or linguistic improvement of Wikipedia. Do as you wish. Firstorm (talk) 00:27, 17 January 2017 (UTC)Reply
