{"id":34,"date":"2012-11-02T15:31:23","date_gmt":"2012-11-02T15:31:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/?p=34"},"modified":"2013-01-18T16:09:31","modified_gmt":"2013-01-18T16:09:31","slug":"localizing-our-brands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/2012\/11\/02\/localizing-our-brands\/","title":{"rendered":"Localizing our brands"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately we\u2019ve been discussing how to handle localization of our brand names. There\u2019s currently a note about it on the translation page of the style guide<\/a>, but that will soon be updated to the following:<\/p>\n

Our brand names do not get localized, translated or transcribed. Anything that\u2019s a proper noun with a leading capital letter (Firefox, Marketplace, etc.) remains in the original English and is always spelled out in Roman characters. In some languages, depending on the grammatical case of the word, it may need to have a different ending or be otherwise rewritten to make sense. In these instances, please rewrite the sentence instead to keep the brand name unchanged. All other names (add-ons, themes, etc.) should be localized as usual.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We decided to add the clarification after a recent discussion about how to translate \u201cState of Mozilla.\u201d (The example that sparked it came from Polish, but I\u2019ll use Czech since it\u2019s similar.)<\/p>\n

Because of the way Czech works, there\u2019s no word for \u201cof\u201d that you can use in that phrase. Instead, a literal translation becomes \u201cStav Mozilly,\u201d<\/em> where the changed spelling denotes that it\u2019s \u201cof Mozilla.\u201d If we were to write it as \u201cStav Mozilla,\u201d<\/em> however, to a Czech speaker that would be the equivalent of writing \u201cState Mozilla\u201d in English. It\u2019s not only awkward, it\u2019s also wrong.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d like to preserve the spelling of our brand names wherever possible, so in this case the solution we suggested was to rewrite the phrase to something like \u201cMozilla: Stav spole\u010dnosti\u201d<\/em> or \u201cStav spole\u010dnosti Mozilla,\u201d<\/em> which means \u201cstate of the company.\u201d The meaning is preserved, as is the spelling.<\/p>\n

Please let us know in the comments if this is something you\u2019ve encountered when localizing. We\u2019d love to get more examples and hear about other languages where this kind of thing happens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately we\u2019ve been discussing how to handle localization of our brand names. There\u2019s currently a note about it on the translation page of the style guide, but that will soon be updated to the following: Our brand names do not … Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":379,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[323,7,26518,26517],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/379"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.mozilla.org\/creative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}