In what context should they be translated? Is this specifically about the 3 fonts added in r100580 or is this a general issue for all the fonts available?

Though am more concerned on the 3 fonts added in r100580 ideally all font names must be translated in general too.

Since the purpose of the webfonts extension is to enable people to read text without fonts installed, providing the localized text for choosing font names may not work for all. For selecting a font, one should be able to read the menu. To read the menu webfonts should be already enabled for that language with proper fonts.
But this is not the case always if one directly land in ta.wikipedia, we are setting the default Tamil font.

But for multilingual wikis, ensuring that the localized menu is always readable is gong to be tricky.

For a user who has set the language preference, displaying in English would be bad idea. Atleast for logged in users, font names must be translated since it spoils the look of UI when everything else on page is localized and font names appear on English.

Where/why are we showing font names at all? Is that even actually necessary or desirable? In theory we're just turning on *font that works* in place of *font that doesn't work* and should never need to know or care about the font name, any more than we care what the default font name is in all the languages that render correctly on most devices as shipped.

Font names may be important from the sense of giving the user the choice if there are multiple free fonts available. Much like how the entire world doesnt Arial, people may have individual preferences. Infact if there are 10 fonts, the option of fonts must goto user preferences[another reason to register ;)] (for which I logged bug 31693) instead of cluttering the dropdown.

(In reply to comment #5)

Where/why are we showing font names at all? Is that even actually necessary or
desirable? In theory we're just turning on *font that works* in place of *font
that doesn't work* and should never need to know or care about the font name,
any more than we care what the default font name is in all the languages that
render correctly on most devices as shipped.

Yes. We heavily suffer from feature mania, not only in the WebFonts department :(.

I think we should strive to use one font per language, in which case the selector could simply be a toggle to "enable | disable web fonts".

Striving for simplicity and not exposing implementation details to users, I'm going to WONTFIX this.