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Re: [Translation-i18n] xtensa message pluralization
- From: <Paul dot Koning at dell dot com>
- To: <bruno at clisp dot org>
- Cc: <amodra at gmail dot com>, <augustine dot sterling at gmail dot com>, <translation-i18n at lists dot sourceforge dot net>, <binutils at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2017 21:48:02 +0000
- Subject: Re: [Translation-i18n] xtensa message pluralization
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- Ironport-phdr: 9a23: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
- References: <20171107082716.GY10905@bubble.grove.modra.org> <87EA4B8B-0AEC-4108-B066-0EF801238483@dell.com> <20171109014009.GC10905@bubble.grove.modra.org> <1798074.U70ivZQmiF@omega>
> On Nov 9, 2017, at 2:04 PM, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> wrote:
>
> Alan Modra wrote:
>>> there isn't an "nngettext" to give you the correct message for the plural based on more than one value.
>>
>> ... The translation project is going to be
>> faced with sentences that really do need two or more pluralized nouns
>> for the sense to be conveyed naturally in English.
>
> The former gettext maintainer's usual answer to such a request is:
> - Such an nngettext function would be overkill for a rarely used case.
That's a fair argument. Then again, conditional string handling in Java properties files handles this sort of case without any trouble.
>> Avoiding two
>> plurals in one sentence will mean loss of information (eg. dropping
>> "bytes" from a quantity) or stilted contrived sentences.
>>
>> To recap, the sentence we are talking about here is:
>> "format '%s' allows %d slots, but there are %d opcodes"
>
> You can turn it to:
> "The format '%s' allows %d slots."
> "But there are %d opcodes."
Yes, but that is pretty ugly English.
> Or omit one of the plurals or even both plurals:
> "Mismatch for format '%s': #slots = %d, #opcodes = %d."
> Admittedly this is not so pretty, but in tabular displays this is how
> numbers are often printed, so that plural forms don't appear at all.
>
>> In both cases the
>> "slots" phrase translation can't depend on the quantity in the
>> "opcodes" phrase translation, and vice versa.
>
> Correct, and this is acceptable. You don't have to care for hypothetical
> dependencies that _may_ exist between hardly related entities.
> Take as model some language like French or Latin (with more grammar
> than English), where
> - the variant of the verb depends on the gender of the subject,
> - the variant of the verb depends on the number of objects,
> - but otherwise sentences are unrelated.
> If you can split something into separate sentences in English, you
> can assume that this will work in other languages as well.
That sounds sensible to me. It seems unlikely that a sentence of the form <phrase1>, but <phrase2> has a grammatical interaction between the word forms of the two phrases. So splitting it into two separately translated parts "<phrase1>" and ", but <phrase2>" seems ok. If there actually exists a language where that doesn't work I expect we'll hear about it (and we can then figure out what to do about it).
paul