Re: Guidelines for "fancy" plurals

[Matej Urban <matej urban gmail com>]

CC'd to gnome-commander developers!

I bookmarked this thread, cause this is something sitting on my mind
for a long time.

Slovenian language has 1 singular and 3 plural forms.

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In my experience, developers often try to "compact" the output, which
does not work in Slovenian language and I also doubt it works in
other. I have to brake grammar to make sense. Every counting number
should have its own translatable line. Seahorse is a good example of
how to do it correctly in some parts and also how to not do it
correctly (#: ../plugins/nautilus/seahorse-tool-files.c:346) when they
forget that there are more plurals in other languages!

An example can be found in gnome-commander (far from being the worst
one; It's just the one I'm currently working on!). Instead of:

msgid "Deleted %ld of %ld file"
msgid_plural "Deleted %ld of %ld files"

There should be:

msgid "Deleted %ld"
msgid_plural "Deleted %ld"

msgid_plural "of %ld file"
msgid_plural "of %ld files"

That would make sense when translated. The developers should not
forget to write a comment about what the whole sentence looks like for
each translatable line. That would produce now impossible correct
sentence ...

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Problem with zero values is also very prominent!

In plural:
msgid "Found %d match - search aborted"
msgid_plural "Found %d matches - search aborted"

The correct msgid for value 0 is "No matches found - search aborted".
In English "Found 0 matches" sounds far better then Slovenian
translation. I'd suggest to optionally add "a plural" for zero values
where %? counters can be omitted.

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There are also other grammatical issues concerning propositions in
Slovenian language which I doubt that can be solved easily. In
translations like the ones below, correctly translated string sound
awful, cause propositions are bound to the first letter of the number.
This really is "fancy", but I suggest that along with plurals, a
system for dealing with this issues tries to get developed (The
example is of course not considering correct plurals).

msgid_plural "List with %d items" or
msgid_plural "Attach to %d documents"

msgid_plural "Seznam s %d predmeti" %d is 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 ... s should be %s
msgid_plural "Seznam z %d predmeti" %d = 1 2 8 9 ... z should be %z

msgid_plural "Pripni k %d dokumentom." %d is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 .6 7 8 9 10
.. s should be %k
msgid_plural "Pripni h %d dokumentom." %d = 1 2 8 9 ... z should be %h


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In libgnomedb a string would sound much better if the word sequence
gets changed:

msgid_plural "%d rows impacted\n"

If the string would be:

msgid_plural "impacted %d rows\n"

the translation would be clearer. Unfortunately the usage is not
commented and I do not know if I can change the word order. Every
plural should have a comment!

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When I find other different examples I'll post them here.
Matej