Handling plurals with no numbers inthe text?

Christian Ehrlicher

Simply add a function and eithter set the text for one or for more items (and hopefully don't have to translate to languages which has more translations)

Perdrix

Yes Polish is a bear to translate plurals.

JonB

@Perdrix said in Handling plurals with no numbers inthe text?:

Yes Polish is a bear to translate plurals.

Purely OoI, given this topic is solved, why is that? I know no Polish!

Perdrix

@JonB In Polish, there isn't just singular and plural, there are three forms:

Singular: n = 1
Paucal: n = 2--4, 22--24, 32--34, 42--44, ...
Plural: n = 0, 5--21, 25--31, 35--41, ...

Luckily Qt understands that and offers three forms for Polish translation.
D.

JonB

@Perdrix
What? Are you serious?? You have to count how many in ranges to decide how "plural" they are??? Surely you can't have a different word-plural for if it's between 2 and 4 in each ten.....

Perdrix

Deadly serious! Dom is Polish for house.

0 domów
1 dom
2 domy
5 domów
21 domów
22 domy

etc..

D.

jsulm

@Perdrix @JonB Similar in Russian:
0 Domow
1 Dom
2 Doma
3 Doma
4 Doma
5 Domow
6 Domow
21 Domow
22 Doma

I know, in English you do not even differentiate between "Du" and "Sie" (German) :-D

JonB

@jsulm
OMG. But this is not practical! If I want to ask you about the cows in the field, and I want to speak very correct Polish, I have to first count to check whether there are 21 or 22 or 25 of them....!

jsulm

@JonB Only if you want to tell the exact number of cows :-)
Yeah, some languages have their specialities.

mchinand

@JonB said in Handling plurals with no numbers inthe text?:

@Perdrix
What? Are you serious?? You have to count how many in ranges to decide how "plural" they are??? Surely you can't have a different word-plural for if it's between 2 and 4 in each ten.....

Somewhat similar in English are the endings of ordinal numbers. 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, ...11th, 12th, 13th,... 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th,..., etc.

JonB

@mchinand
Oh, yes, kind of, I see. Just I don't have to count how many cows :)

SimonSchroeder

This got a little side tracked. But, I think I have another solution to offer.

In the original code you could actually write tr("%nLight Frames", fileCount). Then you would also need an English translation. The English translation file also just needs the translations for where you are using these plurals because everywhere else it will fall back to the language in the source code (which happens to be English 😊). Any translation would certainly drop the %n, but could use it to differentiate the plurals.