Re: plural forms for counting “composed” numbers: “3 hours, 2 minutes remain(s)”?

[Marcel Telka <marcel telka sk>]

On Fri, Oct 03, 2008 at 12:58:46AM +0200, Christian Neumair wrote:
> Feel free to skim over this message, but just want to know where you can
> help as a translator with a non-english mother tongue. Your feedback is
> important for solving the Nautilus translation bug 551222 [1].
> 
> 1. Where YOU can help us
> ========================
> 
> In your mother tongue, in the sentence
> 
> “3 hours, 2 minutes remain(s)”
> 
> do you decide which verb form (i.e. plural form) to use for “remain”
> based on
> 
> A. the SUM of hours and minutes
> B. ONLY the hours
> C. ONLY the minutes?
> 
> In English, Spanish, Italian and German we just A., i.e. the sum.
> 
> However, these languages are special in that we just have two plural
> forms N=1, N!=1, so in this case the plural would always be used.
> 
> On the other there are very complex plural forms in some languages (for
> instance in Russian).

In Slovak language we have different order of words in the translated string:

zostávajú 3 hodiny a 2 minúty (remain 3 hours and 2 minutes)

and we are counting only hours (or minutes where there are no hours at
all; whatever is first in this example) to determine whether singular or
plural form of "remain(s)" is used. Examples:

zostáva 1 hodina a 2 minúty (singular form of "remain(s)")
zostávajú 2 hodiny a 1 minúta (plural)
zostáva 1 minúta (singular)
zostávajú 2 minúty (plural)
zostáva 1 hodina (singular)
zostávajú 2 hodiny (plural)


The important thing is that we have 3 plural forms:
1 - singular
2 to 4 - plural, form 1
other - plural, form 2

Example:
1 minúta
2 minúty
5 minút

BUT, when translating "remain(s)" for these 3 plural forms we are using
only two forms of translated "remain(s)":

zostáva 1 minúta (remains - singular; minute - singular)
zostávajú 2 minúty (remains - plural; minute - plural, form 1)
zostáva 5 minút (remains - singular; minute - plural, form 2)

There is no third form for "remain(s)" in Slovak. Or we could say that
translated "remain(s)" have plural form 2 and singular form just equal.


My 2 eurocents.

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| Marcel Telka   e-mail:   marcel telka sk  |
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