[TYPO3-v4] [XLIFF] Support plurals

[Jigal van Hemert]

Hi,

On 14-12-2011 10:06, Xavier Perseguers wrote:
> The answer will be easy once we implement the last bits of
> what XLIFF really could bring us: support for plurals.

Interesting subject: "plurals". It has some challenging concepts in 
various languages [1]. Something we (partly) need to implement in this 
feature.

Singular, plural, ....?
-----------------------
Many languages have dual (two), trial (three), paucal (a few) numbers. A 
few of the supported languages (Solvenian, Arabic, ...) have dual forms. 
Even English has traces ( one, both, all ) of dual forms.

Polish has a different form for numbers where the last digit is 2, 3 or 
4 (but not 12, 13 and 14). Other (supported) languages have similar rules.

Zero
----------------------
Another challenge is handling zero. English, Dutch, German, etc. use 
plural for zero items; French uses singular.

Multiple plurals (or combination of other forms)
------------------------------------------------
We have labels with multiple place holders. What if more than one place 
holder (number) influences the plural form?
	"Result: %$1d items shown (%$2d items hidden)"
Now we have 2 counts that influence the form. Together with duals, etc. 
it can be quite challenging to determine which label must be used.

Should we have this?

One could argue that we currently don't have any support for plurals and 
any improvement is a step forward. On the other hand, if it isn't done 
properly from the beginning it is very unlikely that it will ever be 
improved in the future.

Pootle seems to have support for this [2], but I doubt that it can 
handle combined plurals.

My proposal:
- implement use of plurals for xliff
- make sure Pootle handles plurals correctly for specific languages 
(duals, etc.)
- don't support multiple/combined plurals
- don't implement replacements (simply because there is no standard way 
replacement is done yet; even in the core there are different forms: 
some use sprint syntax, other cases use {varname}, etc.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural
[2] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/l10n/pluralforms

-- 
Kind regards / met vriendelijke groet,

Jigal van Hemert.