Seventy-one percent of current Internet users and this percentage is still rising. At the same time, only a few people specialize in internalization. As a result, most websites don’t handle it well — because things that look simple at first glance aren’t really 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 saudi arabia phone number data 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 building a community around 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 bz lists number. Let’s say 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.