Guidelines for "fancy" plurals

[F Wolff <friedel translate org za>]

Hallo everybody

Slightly technical message related to plurals to follow below.  Feel
free to skip if you want.



I'm translating Rhythmbox, and just noticed plural messages like these:

	%d artist (%d)
	All %d artists (%d)

To me this just doesn't seem like the correct use of plurals. Even in
English, this will cause something like
	All 0 artists
which sounds strange to me, although I am not a native speaker of
English.

What this seems to be, is that the developer wants two different
messages, that _seems_ to correspond to the singular/plural split in
English (except for the problem where %d=0 that I mention above):
	1 artist
	All x artists

These should be in two different messages, and at least the second one
should be done with ngettext, correct? My guess is that the first would
also be more correctly handled with plurals, so that the "All..."
message is only used when more than one artist is involved.

	0 artists
	1 artists
	All 2 artists
	All 3 artists
	All 4 artists
etc.

So the fact that at some stage we want to stat using "All" in the
sentence, just roughly corresponds with the idea of plurals. Of course
in English, the case of "All 2 artists" just happen to sound stupid
anyway, since I guess it would be better to say "Both artists", but
let's make that an issue for another day. If we arbitrarily switch from
the one plural message to the other at 2 or 3, my guess is we are
probably going to get problems in some languages anyway.

For languages with only one noun form, having one message means that
whatever wording is used, must be used for all numbers anyway.

Am I correct that this example from Rhythmbox is not the correct use of
ngettext? How can we extend the development guidelines to explain
plurals more carefully?
http://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/DevGuidelines/Plurals

I like to think about plurals as "a way to allow the correct grammatical
rendering of a message where a noun is qualified by a directly mentioned
cardinal number (in digits)", but that is probably far to technical to
document like that, and might not even be factually accurate. The issue
is that the singular and plural forms should probably be very close to
each other and not contain other qualifiers (like "all") that might not
correspond to the grammatical handling of the cardinal numbers in all
languages.

Am I making any sense? Any ideas/comments?

Friedel

--
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http://translate.org.za/blogs/friedel/en/content/localisation-paper