Am 20.05.2008 um 05:02 schrieb Ricky Sharp:
There was a very short thread on NSLocalizedString regarding plural rules:[snip]
In Russian (which has three plural rules), they kind of "cheated" by still only having two strings:Well, I guess they had no other choice, if the software uses just two forms, the localizer/translator can't add additional forms for her language, so he needs to cheat to get something that's not blatantly wrong in her language. These days most US software seems to use this reduced kind of a model, though some add a case for 0. "0 songs" is preferably a item by itself, so translators/localizers are able to use a textual representation of 0. For e.g. German that could be "0 songs" = "Keine Titel" or some such. I believe that even in English (I'm a non-native speaker, which you probably guessed) "No songs" is superior to "0 songs".1 song songs: %d
I think this concept is valid, but believe it would be easier to have these keys statically for all languages. It is easier and probably less expensive to have translators/localizers translate those 5 entries into each language than make sure they get proper instructions how to add keys to the localizable.strings file. (If you consider how AppleGlot works, they'll have to add back their special keys with every loc cycle as AppleGlot blows away additional keys from localized strings files) So I'd just add these 5 lines statically:Is this really the common practice? To basically force all languages to just use two strings?I thought of doing the following instead:Figure out plural rules for given locale. This rule theoretically could be an entry in the .strings file itself that could be parsed to denote a function. Such a function would return the ordinal "plural rule" value given some quantity "n". The ordinal value would then get appended to the base key.So, in languages with two rules, you'd have something like this: "%d song_0" = "%d song"; "%d song_1" = "%d songs";In languages with 5 plural rules, you'd then have 5 keys ("%d song_0" .. "%d song_4").Has anyone else tackled this problem?
"0 songs" = "No songs"; "1 song" = "1 song"; "2 songs" = "2 songs"; "3 songs" = "3 songs"; "%d songs" = "%d songs"; // 4 or more This will not be enough in cases where you have something like:"iSounds could not transfer all items to your iGadget. %@ could not be transfered."
If you replace %@ by one of the items (except the first ;) in the list above you will give localizers a hard time, because some languages reflect singular/plural in verbs and adjectives. So you will have to create a list for that, too.
Cheers, Horst
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