Originally Posted by
username
Well, I ended up going to Kaohsiung because I was too lazy to deal with the bus for Tainan and the taxi for Taizhong. Other than the weather (somewhat hazy so it was not great for taking pictures) and the uncomfortable seats on the HSR, I enjoyed the trip.
Glad to hear the trip has worked out for you!
[Long OT warning]
Originally Posted by
username
Of course, due to political reasons, the KMT jurisdictions use one way of English translation (like Mainland with the Xs and ZHs) and the DPP jurisdictions use another (like how Taiwan has traditionally done it).
Actually, KMT's preferred romanization was historically Wade-Giles: that's how they ended up calling themselves KMT and not GMD. The problem is this system has at some point become bаstardized by dropping the diacritics, so for example "chuan" can be any of /juan/, /quan/, /chuan/ or /zhuan/ ("chüan", "ch'üan", "ch'uan" and "chuan" in proper Wade-Giles respectively), and there's no way to tell which one it is without looking at the corresponding Chinese character, which defeats the purpose of having a romanization system in the first place.
There was also the conviction that Chinese people should not use Latin letters to write Chinese language, so a phonetic alphabet called Zhuyin Fuhao, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols or colloquially Bopomofo was developed instead. Loosely inspired by the Japanese kana, it is the only one used in education to this day, the result being that most Taiwanese people have no idea how to write down the pronunciation of their own language in Latin letters in any of the romanization systems. This is in huge part why you see all the names of businesses transcribed in a "funny" way. By comparison, most Chinese use Hanyu Pinyin to type on their computers or smartphones, and are thus well-versed in it out of necessity.
The subsequent governments' handling of the topic only progressively exacerbated the confusion: Gwoyeu Romatzyh was the officially mandated standard back in the days when KMT ruled China but it never gained much traction. In the 1980s it was decreed to replace it with another purposely-developed system called Mandarin Phonetic Symbols II but it ended up being mostly irrelevant as well, although remnants of both can still be occasionally seen in a small number of placenames such as when Shilin is written "Shrlin" (not a typo but MPS II) or Heping Rd becomes "Herping Rd" (first syllable is from GR, for consistency the second one should have been "pyng").
Then, in the 2000s, there was the DPP-endorsed Tongyong Pinyin, advertised as being easier to learn for "foreigners" (read, speakers of English never exposed to any other language written with the Latin alphabet). In practice, it was just an inferior, internally inconsistent rehash of Hanyu Pinyin, whose original sin of "not invented here" could never be forgiven. Tongyong Pinyin included some changes for change's sake, such as "jhong" for /zhong/, and made many syllables longer than Hanyu Pinyin ("Kaisyuan" for Kaixuan) while never being shorter. It also obscured the pronunciation rules by making them more context-dependent but the worst part about it was the overlap with Hanyu Pinyin, which, combined with limited adoption (as it was made "voluntary" from the start), guaranteed that ever since it was introduced, seeing a placename with e.g. "si" in it one can never be sure whether it's /xi/ or /si/ (written "sih" in Tongyong Pinyin), which only served to muddle the waters even further.
Also, some placenames follow the even older Postal Romanization System ("Kinmen"), some include syllables transcribed into English ("Keelung"), some are misspelled ("Zongshan") or mix different systems ("Herping"). Sometimes, names are translated -- or not: Gongyuan Rd in Taipei, meaning "Park Rd", is left as such, while Yuanqu St, meaning "[industrial or business] park" becomes "Park St." In a couple of cases, a local government adopted some non-standard name out of the blue: Yilan called itself "E-Land" to attract technology industry, while recently the name of one of the districts on the outskirts of Taipei had to be changed in a myriad of places including all around the MRT system as it went from calling itself "Danshui" to "Tamsui," supposedly in Taiwanese Minnan language, however virtually impossible to pronounce correctly, as it is written in a peculiar way and follows the literary reading, which is hardly ever used, especially in such context. The same place used to call itself "Danshuei" just a couple of years earlier. The change was made supposedly to reflect its history but, for the record, it was historically called differently altogether.
Long story short, placename romanizations in Taiwan can be encountered in any of the six distinct systems, a mix or a misspelling of them, or they can be one of the numerous exceptions.