vikungen:

vikungen:Keep on translating all the brand names and nobody will understand what you're talking about.

How many languages do this?

I just checked through the Wikipedia pages of almost every single language with an article on Microsoft Windows, and no big surprises there, the only language translating the brand name "Microsoft Windows" was... Esperanto. Not even super conservative Icelandic translates brand names.

Unless you also count languages that don't use the Latin alphabet. In Japanese, for example, most proper nouns are transliterated to a spelling with phonetic katakana characters. (Once you get the hang of it, the transliteration process is very predictable in most cases). As an exception, brand names are often spelled in our alphabet due to marketing (Google is almost always just spelled "Google" on official material from them themselves), but popular brands and companies such as Google and Facebook are still very often spelled phonetically (グーグル guuguru, フェイスブック feisubukku). Even major newspapers do this often. And regardless of spelling, the pronunciation is the same.

And among languages that use our alphabet, while they usually don't change the spelling, many languages do change the pronunciation. (e.g. write Google and Facebook, but say Gugel/Gugul and Fejsbuk, as opposed to English pronunciations.) In a sense it might be preferable for many speakers to write it phonetically, instead of having to learn (or, in many cases, guess) what the pronunciations of such words are.
　

Though I should say this post is mostly devil's advocate. I would not spell Google as Gugel, and I would probably wouldn't change the spelling of M&M's. Although I think I might use the word emenemoj or mo-kaj-mo in spoken Esperanto. But the point is, several people here say esperantized names only lead to confusion, while in my experience with Japanese that is not at all the case. Actually the opposite is true, as long as you are consistent with transliterating the names. Though the big drawback with doing this in Esperanto is that you can't at a glance see which spelling type is used, unlike Japanese where you know it's a transliteration by the characters it's spelled with.

I guess if Esperanto where in its infancy I would perhaps propose all words that are not spelled phonetically to be marked in some way. (like "Mi ŝatis ĝin ĉe :Facebook:" or something like that) But it's a little late for that now.

The phonetic transliteration in Japanese though, is intended to mimic the actual sound of the words for a Japanese audience. I think here of the way Savile Row was rendered as 'savi-ro' (which is now standard meaning for a 3-piece suit in Japanese) and, of course, Limousine into 'rimujin'. It's a close approximation to sounds rather than a 'Japanisation' as such.

If I heard the sound 'momo' in the middle of a sentence I'd assume the speaker had forgotten to put in his dentures!

or in the spirit of "mojosa" (if only to irritate some people and give them yet another reason to belittle other samideanoj {as if they need a reason in the first place, it seems}) we could call them "mokomoj"!

Vestitor:The phonetic transliteration in Japanese though, is intended to mimic the actual sound of the words for a Japanese audience. (...) It's a close approximation to sounds rather than a 'Japanisation' as such.

Yeah, I guess I was aiming more at Fejsbuk-style spellings than Fejsbuko-style ones. Because the former are close approximations too. I also think I've seen Skajp more than Skajpo, but I could be wrong.

Either way, words like Visaĝlibro (which I have seen too) are definitely overdoing it. I assume it's mainly native English speakers that do that, because almost no language actually translates English proper nouns like Facebook.