i should have pointed at http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines/Plurals earlier. i think everything is also perfectly described other there... :-) Am Sonntag, den 06.01.2008, 17:06 +0100 schrieb Benoît Dejean: > Le dimanche 06 janvier 2008 à 15:22 +0100, Andre Klapper a écrit : > > in English, a noun differs only in its singular and plural forms. that > > does not work for a lot of languages, so yes, please use ngettext. > > I know, but i don't get it. > If i read you correctly, we should then use ngettext on every string > with a plural. no, because languages have only one word for a non-defined number of things, like when you write "windows", without any number or "%u" in front of it. the problem is when you have a string like "%u windows". even if it always plural, you must use ngettext because for example in czech, the translation of "%u seconds" is "%u okna" for 2 < %u < 4 and "%u oken" for %u >= 5. it totally depends on the value of %u, that is what ngettext is about. see in gnome-system-monitor/trunk/po/cs.po: "Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=(n==1) ? 0 : (n>=2 && n<=4) ? 1 : 2;\n" or in gnome-system-monitor/trunk/po/ar.po: "Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==2 ? 1 : n>=3 && n<=10 ? 2 : 3\n" or in gnome-system-monitor/trunk/po/sl.po: "Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; plural=(n%100==1 ? 1 : n%100==2 ? 2 : n%100==3 || n%100==4 ? 3 : 0);\n" another example (cannot come up with an explicit language though): some languages may also have different words for "windows" in the cases of {1,11,21,31,...}windows and {2,12,22,32,...}windows. andre -- mailto:ak-47 gmx net | failed http://www.iomc.de/ | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper
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