On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 7:44 PM, Ruediger Landmann
<r.landmann(a)redhat.com> wrote:
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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I may be showing my ignorance here.....but I thought that since
Fedora is a trademark, and a proper name that it was always Fedora.
Much as I am always David regardless of what country I may be in or
language I may be speaking.