Re: Transliteration of English acronyms into Local Language

[Sankarshan Mukhopadhay <sankarshan randomink org>]

On Thu, 2004-08-19 at 14:24, Christian Rose wrote:

> 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.
> 

I guess that this is the *safest* option. Transliteration of acronyms
perhaps in a majority of the cases tend to muddle up the complete aim of
localising a component. If equivalent and proper local language acronyms
are available there is a case for transliteration.

> 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.
> 

A 2 edged sword really. What happens if this is for a L10n which MSFT or
Apple have not taken up ? The yardstick would perhaps being doing
transliteration for a particular component and then checking out through
test matrix - but that doubles up the effort and gets in user bias.

> 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.

More than that of being a problem with mix of scripts it is an issue
with varying font sizes which sometimes makes the UI *ugly*.

> 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.

Yes I agree. It is better to follow an informal standard for now.

Regards
Sankarshan