Let’s say you need to translate the sentence
“You have {number} new messages”
into other languages.
How to proceed?
Translators know many “crutches” to solve the {number} issue. These include abbreviations, the use of immutable nouns, changing the word order, using colons, parentheses, putting the numeral outside the phrase, and many other “creative” methods.
The generally accepted correct solution — using the CLDR plural rules — has been around for almost two decades. In almost thirty years as a translator, I have only come across one client who has used these rules to guarantee a correct translation in any language. That was the Finnish company Nokia for their mobile phone interfaces in the first half of the 2000s.
Unfortunately, many customers not only don’t use this approach, but don’t even know it exists:
Languages vary in how they handle plurals of nouns or unit expressions (“hour” vs “hours”, and so on). Some languages have two forms, like English; some languages have only a single form; and some languages have multiple forms. CLDR uses short, mnemonic tags for these plural categories:
Plural Rules
- zero
- one (singular)
- two (dual)
- few (paucal)
- many (also used for fractions if they have a separate class)
- other (required—general plural form—also used if the language only has a single form)
The correct solution — creating six keys
messages_zero = “You have {number} new messages”
messages_one = “You have {number} new message”
messages_two = “You have {number} new messages”
messages_few = “You have {number} new messages”
messages_many = “You have {number} new messages”
messages_other = “You have {number} new messages”
When translating into Russian, for example, four of these would be required:
messages_zero = “У вас {number} новых входящих сообщений.”
messages_one = “У вас {number} новое входящее сообщение.”
messages_few = “У вас {number} новых входящих сообщения.”
messages_many = “У вас {number} новых входящих сообщений.”
Have you ever come across clients who don’t realise that plurals can have multiple forms in other languages?