More detailed plural handling for translations

[spacediver]

HI all,

Many thanks to the authors and the community, and I'm glad to see Russian translation underway (and touched it already).

I'd like to suggest an imrovement for internationalization code, which concerns the plurals handling.

Currently we translators do substitute strings of text with '%s' and '%d' in them, which leads to clumsy patterns like '%d item(s) is drawn', or just incorrect usage of fixed words (like '1 items') Moreover, in many languages there are a bit more complicated rules for plurals, with three forms of these.

It is considered an important requirement to handle plurals correctly in order to provide a highly usable and attractive service, which I hope this website will grow towards.

Further reading:

1. A motivating discussion by Artemy Lebedev, designer;
2. An example of approach to the subject from the Qt programming library, with rules for several languages.

Thanks.

[Een]

Hi spacediver,

You are, of course, right. And having been a student in Russian last year, I can well understand how plurals can be troublesome.

This is a big thing, though, and it would need quite a lot of changes... We have the client side, the server side, the collaborative translation interface and the parsing scripts to consider: that's a lot of work and I am not even sure it can be done properly on the client side at this point.
I'll have to think about it.

Een

[spacediver]

OK I see indeed.

However, as time goes, the base of games is expanding, as well as the base of translations done, which makes the future transition even more cumbersome potentially. That's the eternal dilemma, though.

P.S. Hey, what was the study, where? I am involved in tutoring to some extent