Software developer David's question was easy enough on the surface. I mean, it really didn;t seem like the kind of question that would inpsire deep conversations and government and language and politics and locales and so on:

I recently found some data for my component that had ‘Microsoft Corporation’ loc’d into Russian. I was told a long time ago that the company name and product names were never allowed to be localized. I’d thought that this string was never to be loc’d, but if the loc tools are letting it happen, how can I tag my rc file such that it won’t?

Now it would be easy to try and say that this is a branding issue, that you have to leave it English, and so on.

People such as myself and others explained that this was not always the case, though.

Which is of course helpful in general for people who are automatons with no real need of an illustrative example for an odd phenomenon that piqued one's curiousity and made one reassess one's assumptions.

Now I won't deny that such people might exist at Microsoft,

But we didn't have them in stock on this day. :-)

and luckily IPE Andrey had such an example -- not just any example, but the specific one relevant to the original question!

His words:

Let me try to explain this strange phenomenon to people who don’t speak Russian.

According to Russia’s laws, you have to use Cyrillic alphabet in products sold in Russian market whenever it is possible – hence “Microsoft Corporation” should become “Корпорация Майкрософт” in Russian texts. This is simple transliteration to Cyrillic of the company name – from Russian point of view this is not a change of the company name, it just makes company name readable to people who are not familiar with foreign alphabets. Unfortunately [from the standpoint of people who would like to see such terms not changed -- MSK], Microsoft can’t prohibit the usage of the native Russian alphabet and say that it is not allowed to use in Russia – we own our products, but we don’t own Russia’s language and laws.

Just imagine if, say, Sony Corporation would tell you that in your English text you should use instead of “SONY” a couple of strange-looking Japanese hieroglyphs that you don’t even know how to pronounce for their company name - and can’t use Latin letters instead of it.  Would you like it?

That does put it all in perspective, doesn't it? :-)

And Russia is hardly the only place that has such requirements for software that is sold in their market.

Many readers of this Bloog, were I to say Japan or Canada or Taiwan or France or China would probably be able to name specific requirements that either the software developers, or the localizers, or oth, have to know about and heed.

Anyone out there have some favorite requirement they want to mention? Bonus points if you either know one outside of the above or know at least one in all of the above! :-)

 

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