R: Converting names in a column to translated names based on a reference file-CodePudding

Thank you for looking at my question, and happy new year!

My problem/question: I have a dataframe column containing a list of names like this (some also repeating):

Name (German)
Josef
Georg
Mathilde
Josef
Ludwig
Lorenz
Georg
...

And I want to e.g. convert these names to their English counterpart, with the corresponding names in German and English being contained in another reference file/dataframe like this:

Name (German)    Name (English)
Mathilde         Mathilda
Georg            George
Lorenz           Lawrence
Josef            Joseph
Ludwig           Lewis
...

So that at the end, my dataframe with a new column would look like this:

Name (German)    Name (English)
Josef            Joseph
Georg            George
Mathilde         Mathilda
Josef            Joseph
Ludwig           Lewis
Lorenz           Lawrence
Georg            George
...

If anyone knows how to accomplish this, I would be very grateful if you could help me figure out how to do it. In any case, thank you for any help!

With best regards!

CodePudding user response：

Writing a dictionary using read.table().

dict <- read.table(header=TRUE, text='
German   English
Mathilde         Mathilda
Georg            George
Lorenz           Lawrence
Josef            Joseph
Ludwig           Lewis
')

and then match().

transform(dat, English=dict[match(dat$Name, dict$German), ]$English)
#       Name  English
# 1    Josef   Joseph
# 2    Georg   George
# 3 Mathilde Mathilda
# 4    Josef   Joseph
# 5   Ludwig    Lewis
# 6   Lorenz Lawrence
# 7    Georg   George

Data:

dat <- structure(list(Name = c("Josef", "Georg", "Mathilde", "Josef", 
"Ludwig", "Lorenz", "Georg")), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA, 
-7L))