We’ve had a discussion on Fedora Chat [1] regarding GTK/GNOME app name localization, and we couldn’t find a definitive answer to the following question: should all GTK apps that follow the GNOME HIG [2] have their name localized (translated or transliterated)?
So far, I’ve followed my personal rule which consists in considering third party (non org.gnome) app names to be brand names, and therefore not translating them. However, after reading the GNOME HIG App naming guidelines [3]—I’m not so sure anymore, and nor were the others in the Matrix channel.
I think the points that threw me off the most were the ones asking to avoid “Made-up words or word combinations” and “Non-standard punctuation or whitespace”—which essentially make app names regular English that could be translated.
Core apps (more or less what you pointed out as having a org.gnome.* id, although for historical reasons some have such an id without being Core) should have a “generic” name (Files, Web, Disks…) and the expectation is definitely that these should be translated. For other apps that use simple English nouns as names (Authenticator, Audio Sharing…), it’s up to each language team to decide, as long as they stick to a consistent choice across apps, and we recommend they do translate these as well. For more abstract names (Endeavour, Fractal, Hieroglyphic…), it’s also up to teams but we recommend they do not translate them.
The point about made up words in the HIG is more about making it clear what the app is for than it is about translating. It’s also a matter of consistency, as these names don’t really fit in with the rest of the GNOME apps.
May I ask why it was discussed in a downstream situation?