Re: Managing plurals

[Sven Herzberg <herzi gnome-de org>]

Am Samstag, den 09.08.2008, 19:38 +0200 schrieb Ignacio Casal Quinteiro:
> O Sáb, 09-08-2008 ás 14:00 -0300, Leonardo F. Fontenelle escribiu:
> > Em Sex, 2008-08-08 às 21:30 +0200, Ignacio Casal Quinteiro escreveu:
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > gtranslator right now is using a kbabel like style for plurals based
> > > on tabs. 
> > > So I have: msgid with 2 tabs (Singular|Plural)
> > > and msgstr with N tabs (Singular|Plural 1 ...)
> > > 
> > > I want to add that when you are in a message with plurals and you are
> > > in the 
> > > singular tab of msgstr and you press next message, I want to do that
> > > gtranslator 
> > > switch to the Plural 1 tab, if you press again Pural 2 ...
> > > Another thing that I want to do is that if you are in Plural X on
> > > msgstr gtranslator
> > > switches automatically to the Plural 1 of msgid and if I come back to
> > > Singular of
> > > msgstr switch automatically to Singular of msgid.
> > > 
> > > As I only know about languages with 2 plurals here is the question:
> > > 
> > > Can I do this? I mean in Spanish/Galician if you in Plural 1 you want
> > > to see the Plural
> > > tab of msgid but is this user case possible in other languages?
> > > 
> > 
> > This would work for Portuguese, too (big surprise :) ) but probably not
> > for languages with n!=2.
> > 
> > Honestly I don't like tabs for msgid plurals. There will be always two
> > of them, so we'd rather display both the singular and the plural msgid
> > "in parallel". That should be much faster to translate, because of the
> > diminished browsing. Even better, there will be diminished _mouse_
> > browsing, because it's hard to navigate with the keyboard through 3 sets
> > of tabs (msgid, msgstr, catalogs). Original messages with plural forms
> > are typically short, so msgid[0] and msgid[1] could share the vertical
> > dimension of the msgid area of the GUI.
> Could you please try to make a mockup about how you want the interface?

Why don't you just use a table?

Original:
+--------+---------+
| n = 1  | second  |
+--------+---------+
| n =! 1 | seconds |
+--------+---------+

That would properly scale (even visually) to any number of plural forms.
You'd have to manage this as a dynamic user interface interally, but
what counts is what the user sees, not how it has to be implemented.

Regards,
  Sven