Re: Problem with translating gnome-panel

[Youssef Chahibi <chahibi gmail com>]

On Tuesday 20 March 2007 15:24, Khalid Ameery wrote:
> Hello,
>
> When I am trying to translate the gnome-panel to Pushto language it says:
> "Rosetta can’t handle the plural items in this file, because it doesn’t
> yet know how plural forms work for Pushto."
> Can any one help me regarding this problem.
> The same problem is with some other packages.
>
> Regards,

You should contact Rosetta maintainers to set the plural form for you. I guess 
Pashto is simpler than Arabic, Arabic needs about 6 plural forms!

You need to describe how the counted item form changes depending on the range 
of numbers, in Spanish, there are two forms:

* Form 1: When the number of items is "1": Example "1 hoja"
* Form 2: Other numbers, Example "1241 hojas"

In Arabic:

* Form 1: the number of items is "0" (لا كتب)
* Form 2: the number of items is "1" (كتاب واحد)
* Form 3: the number of items is "2" (كتابان)
* Form 4: the number of items is "1 or 2 modulo 100" (1201 كتاب)
* Form 5: the number of items is "from 11 to 99 modulo 100" (3637 كتابا)
* Form 6: the number of items is "0 modulo 100" (100 كتاب)

Spanish is described in Gettext as:

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

Arabic as:

 "Plural-Forms: nplurals=6; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==0 ? 1 : n==2 ? 2
: n%100>=3 "
 "&& n%100<=10 ? 3 : n%100>=11 && n%100<=99 ? 4 : 5;\n"


Setting the plural form is a linguistic issue first, it has been difficult for 
Arabic translators to agree on one plural forms expression for example, while 
it is instinctive in other languages.