Translating Brand Names¶

By brand names we mean Trademarks but also some other recognised but not, yet, trademarked names. Brand names are emerging as the differentiator within Free Software and people are becoming protective over them, i.e. they don’t like you translating them or using them without permission. Examples include (registered or otherwise) Mozilla, OpenOffice.org, KDE, Red Hat, Debian, etc.

Most brand names are easily left as is while some are tempting to translate:

OpenOffice.org: Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress – are all translatable. You team needs to define its policy on this..
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…’. Editor is much more generic than the OpenOffice.org examples.
KDE: kaddressbook – an unoriginal name for an application. This 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, this is not an issue if your users make use of the GUI and not the command line.

Simple Policy¶

Want a quick and easy policy on brand names?

Do not translate any brand or application name

Policy ideas¶

If it works in your language leave it
If it is an obscure application maybe change it
Think of derivatives. Eg. OpenOffice.org 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?
Be consistent. Writing down your policy and reasons saves you having to explain things a hundred times. And policies can be changed.
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.