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Seventy-one percent of current Internet users do not have English as their first language , and this percentage is still rising. At the same time, only a few people specialize in internalization. As a result, most websites deal with it poorly — because things that look simple at first glance are often not that simple at all.
Let’s take pluralization, i.e. conversion to plural. Trying to change singular words to plural in strings quickly fails — even in English, where most plural words end in s . For example, I worked on one photo sharing app that supported two languages, English and Chinese. It was easy to add the letter s to display texts like “X like[s]” or “Y comment[s]”. But what if I need to pluralize words that form them irregularly, like “foot”, “inch” or “quiz”? This is where our attempt at a simple solution collapses, it was just a failed emergency.
At the same time, English presents
A relatively easy case. Many languages have more than two plural forms: Arabic, for example, has six, and many Slavic languages more than three. Indeed, at least 39 languages have more than two plural forms. Conversely, some languages do not have a plural at all, such as Chinese and Japanese, which means that the form of nouns in the singular and plural is the same.
How to master the intricacies of the plural — and solve them properly in projects? In this article, I’ll demonstrate some of the most common problems with pluralization and explain how to deal with them.
Difficulties associated with conversion to the plural
Converting to plural is even more complicated than I’ve mentioned so far: each language has its own rules for defining individual plural forms. A plural rule defines the plural form using a formula that includes some counter . This counter represents the number of items you are trying to convert to a plural number. Let’s say vietnam phone number data we are working with the string “2 rabbits”. The number before the word “rabbits” is the counter. In this case, it has a value of 2. If we take English as an example, it has two forms: singular and plural. The rule will therefore look like this:
If the counter has an integer value operating a brand online store of 1, use the singular form : “rabbit”.
If the counter has a value that is not equal to one, use the plural form : “rabbits”.
However, this does not apply to Polish, for example, because the same word — “rabbit” or ” królik ” — can take on more than two forms:
If the counter has an integer value of 1, use “ rabbit ”.
If the counter has a value that ends in 2-4, except 12-14, use ” rabbit “. [1]
If the counter is not 1 and has a value that ends in either 0 or 1, or the counter ends in 5–9, or the counter cz lists ends in 12–14, use “ królików ”.
If the counter has any value other than those listed above, use ” rabbits “.
So much for “singular” and “plural”. For languages that have three or more plural .