Re: Translation of program names

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:03:48AM +1100, Malcolm Tredinnick wrote:

> 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.

Yes, that is indeed a real difference.
While "glines", "gasteroids", "gmixer" and similar are *translatable* (keeping
the "g" (or its transliteration equivalent) and attaching the translation
of the common(s) name(s)); "gnome", "yelp" are not; but they should be imho
transliterable.
Some names like "evolution" or "epiphany" are in a border, as they are proper
names made from common names ("gasteroids" on the other side is different,
it is a compound of a proper name part (the "g") and a common name; but
"evolution" is only a common name (like "windows" or "word" too)).

At the end, it is the user community of the target language to decide imho.

Not also that by "transliteration" I don't mean just rewritting the sound in
another script, but also maybe changing a bit the sound so it matches better
with the target language (that is well shown in the example of "wikipedia"
I told in my previous messages: a lot of languages use the latin script
yet they change the spelling to match their usage)   
 

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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