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List:       kde-i18n-doc
Subject:    Please discuss: Translation of types and properties in Nepomuk
From:       Sebastian =?iso-8859-1?q?Tr=FCg?= <strueg () mandriva ! com>
Date:       2008-10-09 10:50:26
Message-ID: 200810091250.27051.strueg () mandriva ! com
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Translation of types and properties
===================================

With Nepomuk come a bunch of ontologies, sets of types and properties that 
define and relate resources of any kind. This introduces a big translation 
issue. So far the RDF standard only provides simple "label" and "comment" 
fields to describe a type or property. That is obviously not enough. There 
are many situations where we want to present types and properties to the user 
in a generic way. Be it a simple listing of all relations of a resource or a 
statement regarding a resource like "Foobar is a friend".
Different languages have many different ways of handling conjugation, gender, 
and all the other things that come with the terretory.
With this email I would like to start a discussion on a way to (at least 
partially) solve this problem.
The basic question is: "Which forms to we need to store to be able to handle 
the most common situations?".
Let me start by listing the ideas I had for types in english, german, and 
french.

1. plain type name:
   Example: Resource listing in seaech results, very much like mimetypes.
   friend
   Freund
   ami

2. Plural
   Example: grouping of search results
   friends
   Freunde
   amis

3. With article (I am not sure if we actually need the "%1 is" or if that can 
be handled generically
   %1 is a friend
   %1 ist ein Freund
   %1 est un ami

4. With definite article
   Example: "Foobar is related to the friend X" Don't know anything better 
ATM. 
   the friend
   der Freund
   l'ami

5. With definite article plural
   Example:
   the friends
   die Freunde
   les amis

6. With count (can maybe be merged with 3?)
   Example: Display of relations of a resource
   1 friend/%n friends
   1 Freund/%n Freunde
   1 ami/%n amis


female vs. male (as for example in french with a differnet suffix):
Is that really necessary? After all, we never really know if the friend we
are talking about is male or female.

Properties are again a bit more complicated. Imagine for example the simple 
relation "is mentioned in".

7. plain property name:
   Example: Simple listing of properties
   is mentioned
   wird erwähnt

8. plural:
   are mentioned
   werden erwähnt

9. with object
   %1 is mentioned in %2  (or another example: %1 has a rating of %2)
   %1 wird in %2 erwähnt  (%1 hat eine Bewertung von %2)

10. plurtal with object
    %1 are mentioned in %2
    %1 werden in %2 erwähnt

Please think about this for a while and help me finalizing this list by trying 
to translate the examples or the expressions themselves. The system would 
work a bit different than the "normal" translations as applications would not 
use stuff like "%1 is mentioned in %2" but get exactly that from Nepomuk, 
i.e. the property object.

Which do we need? Which are useless? Which are missing?

Please do NOT answer on tf-ont or nepomuk-kde lists. This thread should stay 
in kde-i18n-doc.

Cheers,
Sebastian

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