Localizing "About" in an About box.

[Douglas Gennetten]

Should "About" generally be localized or is it one of those items that
is prefered as English in all languages?

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Post by Douglas Gennetten
Should "About" generally be localized or is it one of those items that
is prefered as English in all languages?

I would expect that in most languages the word "About" is not preferred,
especially if the language is not written in Latin letters.

I wonder what you mean by an "About box". Checking
http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/term_622.txl
I find the definition
"A dialog box that describes the software product as a whole and the
company that created it. The about box typically includes such things as
author credits, copyright and trademark information, licensing and
shareware information, contact information, version numbers, system
requirements, and system configuration."

So do you mean a link (of some kind) that causes such a dialog box when
clicked on, or the box itself, where "About" might appear in a window's
header bar, for example?

_How_ to localize such a box is a difficult issue. In any case, you
should _not_ expect that the expression "About XYZ" can be localized
simply by replacing "About" with another word and using XYZ (the varying
part, like a product or company name) as such. For one thing, some
language may use a completely different type of expression, perhaps
without any preposition, and perhaps with a preposition but with XYZ as
obligatorily in a particular case, with a suffix. The natural expression
might correspond to "Information about XYZ" or "General information about
XYZ" rather than simply a preposition and the name.