[Catalyst] Proper ngettext with Catalyst

Octavian Rasnita orasnita at gmail.com
Sun Feb 1 21:27:17 GMT 2009


From: "Kieren Diment" <diment at gmail.com>
> In indonesian, to pluralise you just say the word twice, or in writing 
> put a 2 after it.
>
> I have two apples:
> Saya ada dua appel appel.
> or:
> Saya ada dua appel2
>

"Saya ada [quant,_1,appel,appel appel]."

But it doesn't do a perfect translation this way, because instead of "dua" 
it just puts 2, which is not very nice in some languages.

For example, in Romanian some numerals depend if the noun is masculine or 
feminine:
1 is "unu" for masculine and "una" for feminine nouns.
2 is "doi" for masculin and "doua" for feminine nouns.
And it also depends for 21, 22, 31, 32, and so on, but these bigger numbers 
are usually written as numbers because they are too longer otherwise.

For 1 and 2 however, in many cases they are written as words because it is 
much clear.

Another problem is the case of 0 because in English is easy but in other 
languages the structure of the sentence is totally different.

For example:
I have seen 1 boy.
I have seen 2 boys.
I have seen no boys.

But in Romanian it should be:
Am vazut 1 baiat.
Am vazut 2 baieti.
Nu am vazut nici un baiat.

Of course, in English works but it is not very nice either. It should have 
been "I haven't seen any boy" or something like that.

Octavian










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