Re: Translation of program names

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Fri, 2003-10-31 at 08:58, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:
> 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?

This is a valid point. It occurs to me that there needs to be a
difference between translation and transliteration. In both cases, the
name is marked for "translation", but in the case of branded products,
it is only converted into the pronunciation equivalent in the locale's
script.

On the flip side: the fact that you can wander around an East Asian city
and see words in English is maybe a counter-argument (and the fact that
my name on my Chinese-language business card was pronounced nothing like
my name is another one).

Malcolm