The locations in Postcrossing are not translated by us — or even put together by us. That is an enormous project we just wouldn’t have the means to even start.
The data comes from the GeoNames project which tries to merge together several datasets into a single database. The result is not without its problems, but it’s still the best free database we have found. I’m not aware of a better one, even commercial ones, that has the level of coverage that GeoNames has.
Now, this topic is actually reporting two different issues: one with the names of the administrative divisions and another with the (potentially) repeated cities. But for both, the explanation is the same: that’s how it comes from GeoNames.
The good news is that GeoNames project is an open project and anyone can contribute corrections to it. We have done it a few times, but we can’t possibly report/fix every issue pointed to us because for many places we just don’t understand enough about the geography to make a proper report. I invite anyone interested in contributing to them — singing up is free. Their editing interface is not the most obvious or easy to use, but in general it works.
We sync with their database 1-2 times a year, so any changes made there will eventually trickle into Postcrossing. We don’t do this more often because it’s a time consuming process where we have to review some of the changes and decide what to do with cities that “disappear” or that “change” country, as the world is not as tidy as we’d wish it to be.
So, sorry for the non-solution, but there’s not much we can do ourselves to directly address this. We don’t want to put local fixes because whenever we update with GeoNames, they would be gone or become inconsistent.
PS: A note about the repeated cities: while there surely may be some duplicates, more than once we have seen cases where there are indeed multiple places with the same name, just of very different scales. Not long ago we were told “Beijing” was under the wrong region, only to found there are 10 places called Beijing in China — here’s what Beijing in Gansu province looks like:
