Paul W. Frields wrote:
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.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.
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.