I noticed an update of Transifex (at least for Russian translation). Now there are 4 translation sections: “one”, “few”, “many” and “other”, while original English variant still has only 2: “one” and “other”. Can someone explain me these 4 sections with examples (in English), so I can use them as a reference for correct translation?
This is called “grammatical number”.
In English, there is singular and plural.
One house.
Two houses
One liter.
Two liters.
0.5 liters.
In English, the rule is simple: If the number is exactly 1, it is singular (“one” in Transifex). Otherwise, it is plural (“other” in Transifex).
Grammatical number rules may be different for each language. I don’t know anything about Russian, but it could be that Russian has a different grammatical number system than English. Which would mean it has more than just singular and plural.
To know what exactly these rules are, you must know Russian a little bit or ask someone who knows the language better than I do.
I mean, I thought that these “one”, “few” and so forth are for reference. I.e. “One house”, “few houses”, “many houses” and “other houses”.
I wonder what Transifex meant by them.
EDT: that’s not an update, as I understand, these 4 grammatical times are for some selected strings. 3 is more common.
This is plural forms of gettext.
Russian lang have 3 plural forms:
1 thing - Just one
2-4 things - Many (but not so big)
5-infinity things - Many
Every plural form for any language can be explained by special gettext string in .po file
Here is example for Welsh Language:
where is:
nplurals=4 – Means that language have 4 plural forms
(n==1) ? 0 - if things num is ‘1’ then use first plural form
(n==2) ? 1 - if things num is ‘2’ then use second plural form
(n != 8 && n != 11) ? 2 - if things num is not 8 or 11 then user third plural form
othewise use forth plural form.
For Russian is more complicated, i don’t want describe this mess =)
Most languages(like English) have simple plural form:
And any translation system must respect plural forms of any language.
Just downloaded a client update to the CBT this morning. Giving you a heads up. Adamas