[Mailman-i18n] another question

[Barry A. Warsaw]

[I'm cc'ing Python's i18n-sig... -baw]

>>>>> "MS" == Mikhail Sobolev <mikhail.sobolev@transas.com> writes:

    MS> Are you going to do something similar for Russian, then? :)) I
    MS> believe, here we have at least three possible cases... :))

    BAW> Can you suggest what needs to be done?

    MS> Well, if I understand it right, as for the current [in Debian]
    MS> version of gettext (0.10.40), there is a special construct in
    MS> .po files, which allow different appropriate translation of
    MS> plural forms.  My understanding (as I never used it) is that
    MS> you need to use ngettext instead of gettext in cases, where
    MS> the result speaks about amounts.  So briefly (I almost quote
    MS> the info page for gettext, the section `Plural Forms')

    MS> Instead of

    |     printf (gettext ("We've got %d bird(s)"), n);

    MS> and even

    |     if (n == 1)
    |         printf (gettext ("We've got 1 bird"));
    |     else
    |         printf (gettext ("We've got %d birds"), n);

    MS> one would need to use

    |     printf (ngettext ("We've got %d bird", "We've got %d birds"), n);

    MS> Where the first string is used as the msgid, and the second
    MS> string is used for the English language in case n != 1.

    MS> You'd need to add a special line to the header entry (example
    MS> for Russian):

    | Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \
    |     plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : \
    |                 n%10>=2 && n%10<=4 && (n%100<10 || n%100>=20) ? 1 : 2;

    MS> And every entry that corresponds to such a text:

    | msgid "the singular form"
    | msgid_plural "the plural form"
    | msgstr[0] "translated string for the case 0"
    | ...
    | msgstr[n] "translated string for the case 0"

None of the Python i18n tools supports ngettext or Plural forms.  I
definitely don't have the time right now to enhance either the gettext
module or pygettext.py to grok this, which seems pretty complicated to
me <wink>.

Unless someone volunteers to add such support to the Python i18n
tools, I suggest we find a way to hack around it in the Mailman source
code.

Cheers,
-Barry