How does sending mail internationally work when countries have different writing systems? For example, if someone were to send a letter from Poland to Saudi Arabia, would the name and address be written with the Latin alphabet or in Arabic?
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You can address a parcel going anywhere in Latin characters.
Past that, the country code / postal code / street address in nearly any order will eventually get it to where it needs to go.
This is managed by the Universal Postal Union:
http://www.upu.int/en.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union
Mail gets to its destination a bit faster if you format the address as expected by the arrival country, but honestly, as long as all the necessary information is there, it will find a way.
/been shipping small packages internationally for 10+ years
The country name needs to be written in upper case Latin letters. This way any postal service in any country can understand which country to send the letter to. But the rest of the address will not be read until it have arrived at the destination country so it can be written in any way they accept.
I live in the US, and my wife sends/receives things to/from her home country of Japan with everything in latin letters, with the names of United States of America and Japan in English. This also happened when I lived in Germany w/ the English name of Germany being used when I ordered to/from other countries most of the time, though I did see the occasional Deutschland when I ordered from Amazon UK and it still got to me.
Many countries have a pact with the [Universal Postal Union](http://www.upu.int/en.html ), which the country of origin will receive the fees for shipping and the receiving country will absorb the costs to get a letter/package delivered.
UPI also helps other countries and businesses to see how addresses are formated (for example Hong Kong does not have postal codes, but China does, so for many systems, Hong Kong is treated as its own country).
For my job, I use UPI frequently as our system is a legacy system and I have to modify the intent of a field (e.g., add the Mexican/Canadian/Australian state/province after the city instead of in its own field).
Honestly, the trickiest ones are mostly Asian countries and the UK as they crame so much stuff on multiple (usually 3) lines. Our legacy system only has 2 lines and forget it if you try to add the business name.
Ideally you’d address a street in a native alphabet/writing system. Also use destination country postcode format.
With only countries name written in latin alphabet / english.
However Postal service in most countries are very good at delivering things 🙂 There are specialized agencies for handling intrnational letter/packages and they will find the address even if you writ it in Polish
According to the UPS guy I work with, carriers generally don’t read what’s written on the labels, instead using their electronic scanners to scan the barcodes on the labels and reading what comes up. I can’t confirm this, but I imagine certain info is translated on the scanners when the packages gets to a region with different languages.
I’ve always written out the destination address in the language/format of the receiving country, then put the destination country on giant letters at the bottom in both the exiting language and destination language.
C. San Felipe 34
3265 Sevilla
ESPANA / SPAIN
Figure the US carrier will know enough to get it to the right country, then from there it just looks like regular mail.
Don’t know if that’s how you’re “supposed” to do it, but it’s worked for me every time!
Here’s an example how a creative way to address a letter can be successful as long as you manage to get it close thought to it’s destination. (They literally drew a map on the envelope)
Without an address, an Icelandic tourist drew this map of the intended location (Búðardalur) and surroundings on the envelope. The postal service delivered!
by inpics
For example, if the automatic address recognition fails a person will look at the address and try to figure out where it should go. So as long as you give clear, easy to read & unambiguous hints you can probably get away with some funky creative addresses.
Would make a cool experiment.
Yea, it’s usually not that hard. Most counties I’ve delt with use a pretty standard format:
Street address
City, Postal
Country
Except for the UK some of their address are random as hell like:
The Highland Cattle Centre
Dere St Farm
Stocksfield
On the off chance you do send something to Saudi Arabia by post or courier, they pushed two years ago to get everyone using the national address system, which uses a building number, street name, neighborhood, city, postal code (five digits) and an extension (four digits). This can be written in English or Arabic. In practice, the most important things are the city, the postal code, and the name and mobile number of the recipient.
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