The full English list of categories available to local guides to describe the main activity of a point of interest contains about 4000 entries. In most other languages there are only about 3000 categories available. The exact amount, however, differs from one language to the other - as far as I can judge without any clear reason why this should be the case (but that’s not the point I want to make here - you can listen to the dedicated local language categories episode of the LetsGuide Podcast if you want to lean more). Which means of course that some categories are available in some languages, but not in others.
An additional issue in this field is the fact that some English category names are poorly or even incorrectly translated in some other languages. That is one of the topics being dealt with in the Categories Explained (?) series.
The best way to figure out if a category is available on Maps, but not in your language (or if the translation is the best one possible), is to compare them on specific points of interest. This is most easily achieved by using 2 devices: a smartphone with the Google Maps app opened in your local language and a desktop (or laptop of course) where you have Maps open in the browser. If it’s not possible to use 2 devices, using the desktop/laptop only is the best option, as it is quite easy to switch the language there: on mobile devices, you need to dive into the device settings and change the lanugage of the device itself to get the app in another language, in the browser version you can simply switch by opening the ‘Language’ option from the main menu. This will open the screen you see at the top of this post. Selecting one of the langiages will immediately change the Maps language.
You can then select any point of interest on the 2 devices to compare the category terms (or switch the language in the browser) and compare the terms you see - and also judge the quality of the translation. To figure out if categories might be missing in your local language, you can just search for some places on Maps that you would expect to have that category and make the comparison, or Google the category name to find examples of places that you should find on the map, either in your country or in any other part of the world.
If the category is there in English, but not in your local language, you will then often see the POI on Maps without any category being entered at all in that language, as you can see in the screenshots below. On the left you see the English version of a POI with the category correctly entered, on the right the Dutch version of hte same POI, where you can see at the bottom that it looks as if no category is linked to the POI at all. And the category indicator (under the ratings at the top of the screen) is of course also missing.
31 Likes
@JaneBurunina as the LG community in Ukraine is quite big & quite active, you can perhaps draw their attention to this post, as it would be interesting to get some feedback about the situation there.
2 Likes
@JanVanHaver It’s certainly weird that the categories is not consistent throughout all the various languages as it would seem to be the easiest way to maintain what’s available or not. We need someone on the Maps team that’s OCD enough to take up this cause!! 
4 Likes
@JanVanHaver ¿Existe alguna liga donde estén publicadas todas las categorias existentes de Google Maps al menos en inglés?
A bit of OCD wouldn’t hurt indeed @AdrianLunsong , but if that were the only requirement, about half of the Connect Moderator team would fit 
2 Likes
@LightRich there is a tool created for Google My Business that lists all categories. That seems to be the same list as we can use on Maps. You can check it for any language you like. You can find it here.
2 Likes
Great! i´ve been wondering about where to find that kind of list for so long… it was just needed to ask the right person! haha. Thanks a lot @JanVanHaver !
2 Likes
Hello @JanVanHaver . This is exactly what we do while editing the map. Thanks for writing such a complete guide for users. Your efforts to write good articles for editing the map, and also the “Let’s guide” podcast caused the “Accurate Editing” to comes more and more to the attention of the LGC community. I really appreciate it.
2 Likes
It’s also my experience @Amiran that most local guides do not have a lot of focus on this, but once they learn about some of the aspect they do get interested - it’s never too lqte to learn 
2 Likes
It was another local guide who pointed it out to me here on Connect too @LightRich . Great to have this community 
2 Likes
Hi @JanVanHaver
You have done very interesting and important research! Indeed I faced this issue before for Ukrainian and Russian translation of categories. Now I’m curious to find and share examples 
I would like to mention @AndriyDegula and @OlegKostyukevich I believe they have a lot to share about it.
3 Likes
Привет @JaneBurunina и @JanVanHaver
История с некорректными категориями уже довольно стара.
Еще года 3 - 4 тому @SergeySud отредактировал в таблице все категории внесенные в Гугл Мой Бизнес для русского языка. Я с товарищами для украинского языка отредактировали 80% категорий.
Но информация переданная сотрудникам Google как всегда пропала в никуда.
Я уверен что многие сообщества готовы помочь с актуализацией категорий.
Только нужен конкретный человек со стороны Google который будет отвечать за обновление базы категорий.
Но это мечты… Google не заинтересован в актуальности и правдивости данных своих ресурсов.
2 Likes
@AndriyDegula
За это время уже какие-то категории изменились, а какие-то исчезли совсем.
@AndriyDegula , согласна насчет бардак в категориях. С удовольствием бы подключилась к работе над пакетным редактирование украинского перевода категорий, если бы был конкретный контакт.
А так можно разве что пробовать писать об отдельных проблемах в разделе Idea Exchange на Коннекте в надежде на исправление. Обсуждали это на мит-апе. Но это, скажем так, не оптимальный вариант, КПД низкий.
