6 ms·

At the risk of driving you up the wall, but please explain

• edgsousa 1y ago
  One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.
• Groxx 1y ago
  pluralization is much MUCH more complex in many languages than in English: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/47/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/47/supplemental/language... it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these). and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.
  • ViscountPenguin 1y ago
    That has to be one of the most cursed functions that I've heard of in my life. Anything less than a call to ChatGPT is doomed to fail.
    • Muromec 1y ago
      It is a solved problem with tools that help to do it right, but nobody does it right. People wrote that cursed function for every language long time ago, but you as a developer need to know it exists and use it
      • Groxx 1y ago
        yeah, I mean `toUpper(string)` exists in basically every language and it's equally cursed. it's nothing even slightly new, just another sigh-inducer when you see people using it.
• eloisant 1y ago
  Making it plural doesn't always mean "replace one word by another". The right thing to do it: add_one = "Add one thing" add_multiple = "Add {n} things" Then you'll provide the full sentence for each language. Of course some languages will need more cases, like slavic language where it's 1, 2-4, 5+, so depending on the languages you need to support you need to put more than 2 strings.
  • deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
• Illniyar 1y ago
  Not the parent, but you use a translation format like `translations("INVITE_USER", {gender_of_host, num_guests})` Then you will have an algorithm that knows to translate based on some rules - like the ICU messages format - https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/messages/ https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/mes... In the link there's an example of how such rules look like (they'll be different for each language)
• smnrchrds 1y ago
  For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.
• sznio 1y ago
  Polish has different plurals for [2:4],[5:21], then [2n+2 : 2n+4], [2n+5 : 2n+11], restarting at 2n = 100 1 osoba 2, 3, 4 osoby 5, 6, 15, 21 osób 22 osoby 25 osób 101, 112 osób