Re: Translation of program names

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Thu, Oct 30, 2003 at 07:48:24PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:

> 1) Translate descriptive names.
> 2) Do *not* translate branding names.

But what about transliteration?
If I used a non latin script I would prefer to have names like "Gnome",
"evolution", etc. in my script.

> Of course there may be exceptions to this, but IMO they should be
> strongly motivated. And so far I haven't heard any motivations that have
> been strong enough.

Think to it from the other side: how would you feel if all the program names
were written in cyrillic, and yet being told that you cannot change those
names and that they should remain in cyrillic in the middle of your
latin script based desktop?

Note also that "Gnome" (as well as "KDE"; and even "Windows" (but that last
one in a non-official way, because of TM issues) have indeed been 
translated/translitered in a lot of different languages; it is indeed
quite common to do it for popular programs, and for programs with traceable
names (like "notepad", "control center", "geyes", "kfax"...)
 
Same also applies to people name; in some languages people name is usually
translitered, and so users of those languages would expect credits window
to display all names in the script for their language, not in latin letters.

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://chanae.walon.org/pablo/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0xD9B85466
[you can write me in Walloon, Spanish, French, English, Italian or Portuguese]

PGP signature