

Pluralizing Translations in i18n - pan_sarin
http://2n.pl/blog/i18n_pluralization

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xtrumanx
For those confused (like I was at first); judging by the post, this is I18n
pluralization in Ruby on Rails.

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progx
Pluralization is really old, gnu gettext solve this long time ago (1995).

[http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html](http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html)

But you are right, many projects not support this, many don't know it or they
are not interessted in other languages.

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declension
Yep, gettext has been working well for decades (and ported to many languages),
though the syntax is a little clunky I find.

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ArthurClemens
Polish has 3 plural forms: 1: When the number is 1 2: When the number ends in
2,3,4, but not 12,13,14 3: For all other numbers

It beats me how translators would use "few" for plural form 2 (which includes
22, 33, 44). "Zero" and "other" are actually the same form. A good translation
tool would spare the effort of entering the same information twice.

How would this work for Chinese, where all numbers are treated the same?

I would never present these keywords to translators, but instead show the full
explanation like in the plural forms above.

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ygra
Translators should know both the source and target language well enough to
know the rules for the different plural forms. Using a name here is probably
just to have a key for them (and frankly, better than gettext's approach). The
correct name apparently would be singular, plural, genitive plural, if I'm
reading Wikipedia right, but that's a bit cumbersome to type every time.

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gpvos
Interesting to see the pluralization rules for so many languages expressed so
succinctly.

Apparently in Polish 11 gets the "many" form (:other in this Ruby library),
but 12 to 14 get the "few" form, like 2 to 4. But in Russian and a few other
Slavic languages, 11 gets the "one" form.

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Octplane
You probably mean useful. And known.

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declension
+1: OP probably should have checked the English grammar and spelling when
writing about... grammar and spelling

