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 ie they don’t like you translating them or using them without permission. Eg registered or otherwise include 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 then 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.