Install Guide now in Publican

[Ruediger Landmann]

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.