Re: Plural support in translations

Kaixo!

On Wed, Jan 31, 2007 at 01:30:00AM +0800, Abel Cheung wrote:

>> zh_CN.po:"Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;\n"
>> zh_TW.po:"Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;\n"
> 
> For Chinese, it is not unconditional to have single plural form.
> Single plural form is only used in cases of specifying a quantity
> of something, like: 1 horse, 2 horses, 5 pieces of paper etc.

That is exactly the intended use of ngettext.

> If sentences in ngettext() call include certain words like
> his/her -> their, then the plural form is the same as English,
> since the singular/plural forms of his/her are different in Chinese
> as well.

Actually, there are various erroneous use of ngettex, I should talk
about the developpers about it.
ngettext should be used only with a number, eg "%d horse(s)",
and not if you want to make a difference between "none/one/several";
that is because ngettext only guarantees that it will return a
translated return associated with a number, there is no guarantee that
there will be a given return only in case of "none" or "one";
several languages have a same return for "1" and "11" and "21" etc.
and even for languages with a simple two forms singular/plural
some use the singular form for "none", while others use the
plural form (in terms of the "plural-forms" formula, some are
plural=(n > 1), while others are plural=(n != 1)

In rpmdrake for example:

msgid "The following package is needed:"
msgid_plural "One of the following packages is needed:"

is an incorrect usage of ngettext; it would be better to have to
separate calls to normal gettext; as the distinction "only one" vs "one
among many" is not a case of grammatical difference of a same word
(like "man" vs "men" in English) but a different wording.

And also, there is no guarantee that all languages have a special case
return of ngettext for n=1. Actually almost all slavic languages
don't have a special case for n=1, which means that the same translation
will be used when there is only 1 package or 1 among 21.
In Welsh po files there is actually a special case for n=2, then generic
case for all the others, which makes it impossible to have a translation
of the intended difference "only one" vs "one amon many".


-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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