Re: Transliteration of English acronyms into Local Language

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

tor 2004-08-19 klockan 06.37 skrev Ankit Patel:
> I am currently working on Gujarati l10n and wanted to know about the
> following:
> 
> Is there any explicit/implicit policy with regards to English acronyms
> while translating. As of now i have retained them in their original
> English form, but can they be represented in their transliterated
> localized version?

Probably depends very much on what's commonly done in your language, and
what will be helpful for the users, both in terms of understanding and
recognizing.

You could probably have a look at the translations of other computer
environments (Windows, MacOS), if such translations exist for your
language, to see what they do with the acronyms. If they do
transliterate acronyms, it's probably safe for you to do aswell. If they
don't, it's probably something you should think twice about before
doing.

I've heard opinions raised before from translators who did transliterate
names (and probably acronyms aswell), because otherwise it didn't look
very nice with a mix of scripts, and probably wasn't helpful for users
not fluent in reading Latin script. So I think it's something that
happens at least in some places.

But, as I said, you should probably look at the translations of other
computer environments into your language first. If there are no such
translations yet, perhaps you can ask around what is done with acronyms
in other Indian languages.


Christian