Translating Brand Names
By brand names we mean Trademarks but also some other recognised but not
trademarked names. Eg include Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Red Hat, Debian,
etc.
Brand names are emerging as the differentiator within Free Software and people
are becoming protective over them.
Most brand names are easily left some are tempting to translate:
- OpenOffice.org: Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress - are all translatable. You team
needs to define its policy on this...early.
- Mozilla: Editor, Mail & News - are all translatable. Unlike The
OpenOffice.org case these are probably best translated. A user would say I
edit my webpages with the Mozilla Editor. Unlike OpenOffice.org were a user
might say 'to do that you need to open Calc and go to...'
- KDE: kaddressbook - an unoriginal name for an application. Probably should
be translated. But be aware a user can only run kaddressbook from the
command line by actually typing 'kaddressbook' it will not work if they type
the translated name.
Policy ideas
1) If it works in your language leave it
2) If it is an obscure application maybe change it
3) Think of derivatives. Eg. OpenOffice has Draw which you might want to keep
and Drawing for drawings produced by Draw which you would want to translate.
Does this make it confusing to the user?
4) Be consistent. Write down your policy and why saves you having to explain
100 times. And policies can be changed.
5) If needed think about transliterating the name so that people can understand
how it is pronounced. This is similar to the idea of transliterating
programmers names.