Documentation issue #2

[Valerio Ricci]

Robby Stephenson <robby at ...> writes:

> 
> On Friday 06 March 2009, Valerio Ricci wrote:
> > id 420 - Series - card has to be taken out
> > id 422 - publisher - board games has to be taken out
> >
> > In addition to it some terms that are not really problems but that can be
> > better specified if divided by categories:
> >
> > id 397 - writer - comic book should be taken out (not a real problem in
> > Italian)
> 
> For most of these, I may be naive, but it's hard to see how a language might 
> have a different word for comic book writer vs. movie writer, or board game 
> publisher vs. book publisher. But I'm well aware of how anglo-centric I can 
> be!

I'm surely not an authority (I'm only a language student with some
linguistics-related exams done) but I can assure you that it is absolutely
possible, and in a certain sense normal. Don't worry about you anglo-centric
point of view, you have surely some advantages of being an mother tongue 
English speaker (at least you don't had to learn another language to use 
computers).

About the difference in "writer" I can say you that in Italian the exact
translation of the word doesn't fit both of the categories. The explanation
could be that the most specific term which is used for that is (I suppose)
scriptwriter, which in Italian is not a compound word but it derives form the
equivalent of screenplay with the suffix for the agent (the EN -er).
In addition to it the other difference is the medium. A movie is a sequence of
images, a book of text, and a comic stands in the middle. Obviously these are 
my hypothesis, there could be different reasons as well, but they're not so 
erratic.
(In this case I was able to find a word which is understandable for both, but
I'm not sure that it is possible in all languages, especially in very different
ones)

In short for the publisher, I don't know the reason, maybe because the most
difficult part in selling a board game in Italy is distribution we use
distributor instead of publisher. Now you can say that a game could
theoretically be published by someone and distributed by someone else, and
that's absolutely true, but there are so many cases in which language doesn't
fit exactly reality so it is not my fault :P .

> > id 406 - color - video should be taken out (I suppose it is b/w
> > vs. color)
> 
> Yes, color as opposed to B&W. I'm not sure how to specify that, maybe saying 
> "not B&W" is enough?
> 
> Robby

I reported this just in case some language has this kind of distinction (In
Japanese the non B&W films are CORAA -from the English word-, and the general
term is IRO -native language-) In Italian is the same as in English, but there
are no problems as the movie catalog has the multiple choice that explains 
itself.

Valerio