Are words like "Apple" / "Google" -- Russian?

Question

I was curious whether common brands like Apple or Google are considered to be part of the Russian language or not.

If one is said to complete something in Russian, is Google, Apple и FreeBSD a fair game, or is it Гугл, Эппл и Фри-Би-Эс-Ди?

Answer 1

Just to add to other answers.
Interaction of English and Russian is very complicated. Latin alphabet is used in school math, so most of people know Latin pronunciation of letter's names and don't know correct English pronunciation. As consequence, many of words changed pronunciation after they had come to Russian. For example:

• key should be read as ки, but if you say this, no one understand you. All people say кей, and you can even find a name of a profession - эникейщик ("tech support", derived from any key)
• FreeBSD should be фри би эс ди, but more often you will hear фри бэ эс дэ
• sometimes you can meet words with completely wrong pronunciation, like ZyXEL. Its official Russian name is Зайксел (accordingly to Wikipedia), but often people say зухель, because Latin y and x looks like Russian у and х (also - линух instead of линукс).

Of course, all written above is about colloquial speech.

Answer 2

If you ask about modern company names, they would mostly be well known in their original spelling (except perhaps for the Asian ones for which we all know their Latin names). And indeed, as Quassnoi already commented, the Russians tend to "absorb" the words and "Russianalize" them by assigning gender and deriving verbs and adjectives from them:

Эппл выпустил...
Погугли это сам
Гугловский телефон

It gets more complex with acronyms, that are rarely transliterated: LG, IBM, BBC. However, it used to be very different in the Soviet time, when the vast majority of people had very limited knowledge of foreign languages and even foreign letters. For all companies well known in Russian for decades, the Russian name was in use. Compare the distributions of BBC and its Russian form Би-Би-Си found in the corpora:

bbc

би-би-си

It's pretty self-explanatory. Similar results—predominantly Cyrillic spelling throughout the soviet time and the growing Latin spelling after 1990—can be found for Форд, Сименс, Зингер, Филипс.

Answer 3

The words гуглить and эппловский are used widely in Russian nowadays, so I'd say yes, they are Russian alright.

Should they be transliterated or not is completely unrelated question.

Latin alphabet is well understood in Russia nowadays, so some authors, especially in IT-related press, don't bother with transliteration. They still, however, use Cyrillic for derived words like those above. Other authors always transliterate the brand names. And of course when transliteration is legally required, like in ООО «Гугл» or in your question above, well, one has to transliterate.

Answer 4

There are two proper ways of using company (or software) names in a Russian text: in Latin (without quotes) or in Cyrillic (with quotes) characters. The first way is preferred for widely recognized names like Apple, Windows, Google etc. while the second one might be better for introducing a new brand, particularly for the reason its pronunciation might be not obvious to most Russian speakers. For example, FreeBSD in proper transcription becomes "Фри Би-Эс-Ди" (in quotes). It originally comprises two parts: a word (which must be separated in Russian version - we never use capital letters inside a word) and an acronym, which is typically transcribed as above.

Answer 5

Sure they're, but could depends. Russia has a vaste territory, in the larger cities closely everyone (except older people), know what are Apple and Google, and both are translated "directly". If you want to say Apple as a fruit, you say : Яблоко . Apple as a brand is like you said Эппл, but that word doesn't exists in russian vocabolary. As well, гугл is just used to refer a brand. (they both are translated like it sounds).

Google -> Gugl Apple -> Eppl