Interpretation of Surface Features of Mars as a Function of Its Verbal—Toponymic—and Visual Representation - Maps for the Future Children Education and Internet - page 107

of the planetary nomenclature who wish not only to write but also talk about
planetary science, this is why the Commission on Planetary Cartography of ICA
established a pronunciation guide, independently from IAU (Hargitai and

Kereszturi 2010 ).
The UNGEGN defines a geographical name as a name applied to a feature on
Earth (UN 2006 ), therefore is not concerned with extraterrestrial names.
National names authorities have also no responsibility for the creation or
approval of a standardized national variant of the planetary gazetteer since plane-
tary surfaces do not belong to any national territories, they are terrae nullius:
“Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to
national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or
by any other means” (UN 1966 ).
A planetary feature name nor is an exonym—a “name used in a specific language
for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language has official
status, and differing in its form from the name used in the official language or
languages of the area where the geographical feature is situated” (UN 2002 )—
neither an endonym—a name from within a social group (Jordan 2010 ) or officially:
“name of a geographical feature in one of the languages occurring in that area
where the feature is situated” (UN 2002 ). This is similar situation to undersea
features (Maciej 2010 ).
This terra nullius situation makes it hard to find the appropriate national or
international body which may be responsible for developing localized variants.
Consequently, localizations (generally: translations)—which is practiced day by
day—are created by journalists, cartographers, popular science authors, online
editors of various magazines and websites, all on an ad hoc basis. Today efforts
to create standardized language variants of the Planetary Gazetteer are made in
Russia, Hungary, China, and probably in Japan and South Korea as well (IPCD
2011 ). If space permits (or the map editor decides to do it so), transformed variants
may appear next to the official, making these maps bilingual and in many cases,
biscriptual. Other countries use the official forms or ad hoc —or, in the case of large
Lunar albedo features, traditional—translations.
The ultimate goal of this work was to confirm or disprove the positive effect of
our efforts on the localization of planetary nomenclature; using these results we can
move forward on developing more localized gazetteers or alternatively we can seek
for other methods of making planetary maps more comprehensive for non expert
map users.

9.3 Methods

In this paper results of two surveys are reported. In both surveys the questions were
qualitative, while Kereszturi ( 2009 ) have conducted a survey in which quantitative
estimates had to be made by students, related to Martian environments from an
astrobiological point of view.