Re: Translation of program names

[Danilo Segan <dsegan gmx net>]

Дана четвртак, 30. октобар 2003. 23:20:39 CET, Christian Rose написа:
> 
> I have little experience on how often other (company, product,
> application) names are transliterated into other scripts. But I still
> believe that one should be very careful with transliteration of  
> names, especially when not others are doing it,

Uhm, Serbian grammatical rules explicitely state that all names should  
be transliterated, and first occurence *might* be followed with the  
original spelling (whatever the source language/script) in parentheses.

Transliteration is more often ugly than not, so I like to avoid it.

> and my opinion is that names that are trademarks should be preserved  
> the way they are.

Okay, this might be the point which distinguishes us. I couldn't care  
less about the trademarks. Trademarks are there to help manufacturer,  
and not the user (if we count out those users who "chase brands").  
Someone might have all the trademarks he wants for "Linux", but I'll  
always write it "Linuks" or "Линукс" in a translation, since "x"  
doesn't exist in Serbian. I never actually saw any benefits of a  
trademark, at least for me as a customer of that brand.

Do I really care if MS wants me to call their word processing app  
"Word"? No, I don't. Do I really care if Sun wants me to call Java  
language Java? No, I don't (it's usually pronounced "Yawa" in Serbian).  
Trademarks have no influence on me, but my language does have a big  
influence on me. So, I choose the latter in any case.

I mostly have no interest in helping a company gain profit. If I  
somehow get that interest, I'll help them directly, not through  
marketing of their trademark.

I also couldn't care less about the legal issues of my misusing of  
trademarks. I don't expect Gnome to have similar stance as a project,  
because it has to cooperate with many "trademarkish" companies. Also,  
bear in mind that all opinions I present here are my own, and not those  
of Serbian translation team.

> Not that we have too many of those in GNOME, though.

Which helps a situation a lot. ;-)


Cheers,
Danilo