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doc: Add section on plurals to strings policy

Thanks to @pryds for explaining this to me on Transifex.
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Wladimir J. van der Laan 10 years ago
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  1. 38
      doc/translation_strings_policy.md

38
doc/translation_strings_policy.md

@ -64,6 +64,44 @@ Avoid dividing up a message into fragments. Translators see every string separat @@ -64,6 +64,44 @@ Avoid dividing up a message into fragments. Translators see every string separat
There have been difficulties with use of HTML in translation strings; translators should not be able to accidentally affect the formatting of messages.
This may sometimes be at conflict with the recommendation in the previous section.
### Plurals
Plurals can be complex in some languages. A quote from the gettext documentation:
In Polish we use e.g. plik (file) this way:
1 plik,
2,3,4 pliki,
5-21 pliko'w,
22-24 pliki,
25-31 pliko'w
and so on
In Qt code use tr's third argument for optional plurality. For example:
tr("%n hour(s)","",secs/HOUR_IN_SECONDS);
tr("%n day(s)","",secs/DAY_IN_SECONDS);
tr("%n week(s)","",secs/WEEK_IN_SECONDS);
This adds `<numerusform>`s to the respective `.ts` file, which can be translated separately depending on the language. In English, this is simply:
<message numerus="yes">
<source>%n active connection(s) to Bitcoin network</source>
<translation>
<numerusform>%n active connection to Bitcoin network</numerusform>
<numerusform>%n active connections to Bitcoin network</numerusform>
</translation>
</message>
Where it is possible try to avoid embedding numbers into the flow of the string at all. e.g.
WARNING: check your network connection, %d blocks received in the last %d hours (%d expected)
versus
WARNING: check your network connection, less blocks (%d) were received in the last %n hours than expected (%d).
The second example reduces the number of pluralized words that translators have to handle from three to one, at no cost to comprehensibility of the sentence.
### String freezes
During a string freeze (often before a major release), no translation strings are to be added, modified or removed.

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