Brand names

Brand names, like Firefox or Sync, are stored as Terms in dedicated files, and shared across the application.

Unless indicated otherwise in comments, the current policy is that brand names can’t be:

• Declined to adapt to grammatical case.
• Transliterated.
• Translated.

They need to be kept in English, and sentences adapted as needed to fit the undeclined name.

For example, a term -brand-short-name is provided in browser/branding/official/brand.ftl

-brand-short-name = Firefox

And it can be referenced in other messages as follows:

close-msg = Do you want to close { -brand-short-name }?

-brand-short-name is defined as a term to allow localizers to define custom attributes, for example to store grammatical properties. Mozilla tools like compare-locales won’t report those attributes as obsolete if the reference language (en-US) doesn’t have them. Each language is then free to put information about genders, animacy, the first letter being a vowel or not, and any more into attributes of terms.

Here’s an example in English:

-brand-name = Firefox

has-been-updated = { -brand-name } has been updated.

And how Polish can adapt its translation depending on the gender of the brand. To understand this example, consider a scenario where -brand-name would be defined in a separate file, and could change depending on the version (e.g. Firefox vs Aurora).

-brand-name = Firefox
    .gender = masculine

has-been-updated =
    { -brand-name.gender ->
        [masculine] { -brand-name } został zaktualizowany.
        [feminine] { -brand-name } została zaktualizowana.
        [neuter] { -brand-name } zostało zaktualizowane.
       *[other] Program { -brand-name } został zaktualizowany.
    }