Paul W. Frields wrote:
Really? Isn't using &DISTRO; a pretty good way to go, as opposed to
doing manual search and replace on "Fedora"? On the other hand, I'm
sure the usage wasn't consistent throughout which is surely a problem
in itself.
Some languages attach various grammatical elements (articles,
prepositions, case markers) to nouns, which means that an entity that
always appears exactly the same way in English may take a number of
different forms in a target language that behaves this way.
By way of illustration: In Czech, if "Fedora" is the subject of a
sentence, it's written "Fedora". However, if "Fedora" is the direct
object of the sentence, it becomes "Fedoru", if it has a possessive
sense ("Fedora's" or "of Fedora" in English), it becomes "Fedory", if
it's an indirect object or indicating a location ("to Fedora", "in
Fedora") it's "Fedoře", and if it has an "instrumental" sense ("with
Fedora") it's "Fedorou" . So:
"Fedora is a Linux distribution" -> "Fedora je linuxová distribuce"
(note also what happens to "Linux" in this sentence; if it were the
subject of the sentence it would be "linuxové")
but
"Get Fedora" -> "Stáhnout Fedoru"
and
"Installation of Fedora" -> "Inštalácia Fedory"
and
"People involved in Fedora" -> "Lidé podílející se na Fedoře"
and
"The most common problems with Fedora" -> "Nejběžnější problémy s Fedorou"
(there's another form as well, the "vocative", which you would use when
calling out to Fedora – "Oh mighty Fedora!" – but I can't find a
practical example of this) But in short: seven different grammatical
cases represented by six different forms of the word; all supposed to be
represented by one single entity in English. [1]
English pronouns still inflect for grammatical case, so this would be
like deciding to set an entity for the word "he". That's fine as the
subject of a sentence, but what do you do when the sentence needs the
pronoun to change to "him" or "his"?
Thanks Paul for the pointers to fedora-trans-list and the package
maintainer's site. I still need a few of these signposts :) and thanks
to all for the positive feedback so far.
Cheers
Rudi
[1] Actually, I'm not a Czech speaker. The situation is very similar in
Russian (which I know a little) but didn't want to use that as an
example because of the different alphabet. The examples I've used here,
however, are collected from the Internet (in particular, from
http://www.fedora.cz/ ), and are not of my own devising. My apologies to
any Czech speakers reading this if I haven't got things quite right!
Even if I have munged things up a little at some point, I think it still
illustrates the pitfalls of using entities that indicate a particular
form in English when translating into a highly-inflected target
language. Russian and Czech have seven cases for nouns. Finnish has
fifteen, and Hungarian has seventeen.
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