GNOME Bug #325284, Difficult to translate ordinal number strings in Nautilus

["A. Walton" <awalton gmail com>]

Apologies for taking so long to forward this one on to the list, it's
been sitting on my ToDo list for a while (and thanks Christian Neumair
for reminding me to do this):

We've had this bug floating around in Nautilus since late 2005, but
the problem has probably existed much longer. In Nautilus, we have
strings which can be difficult to translate for the ordinal number of
copies of a file or links to a file. Examples of these look like: "%s
(%dst copy)%s", "%s (%dnd copy)%s", "%s (%drd copy)%s" and so forth,
where the first %s is the file's base name, the %d the copy number,
and the last %s being the file's extension, with the intended results
being "Filename (2nd copy).txt".

>From a bit of Googling I've seen this question has been brought up
before, but without any resolution
(http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-March/msg00014.html).
So currently, the proposal is to replace this complicated bit of code
and the difficult to translate strings with something much simpler
(e.g. "%s (copy %d)%s", and using the same example as before,
generating "Filename (copy 2).txt"). This seems to be the more
language neutral approach to the situation even if it's not as
"pretty" for languages rich in ordinal numbers. Is there a better way
to translate this type of string that anyone is aware of, or does this
change sound sensible to everyone else? Or is it time for an ordinal
gettext function?

Thank you for your time,
-A.Walton
For the mouse inclined who wish to read the history of this:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=325284