[PSF-Community] Non English Speaking Users of PyPI - We need Help!

[Petr Viktorin]

On 01/26/2016 09:46 PM, Donald Stufft wrote:
> 
>> On Jan 26, 2016, at 3:27 PM, Laurens Van Houtven <_ at lvh.cc> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Donald,
>>
>>
>> One particular concern is for some Slavic languages and counts. If any of your messages has a specific number of things, you need to know what that number is to have a correct sentence (e.g. saying “I am 34 years old” and “I am 35 years old” has a different grammatical structure; notably, you need to know what the number is to know how to spell “years”.). I believe this is currently a limitation of gettext, but I also know that in many languages gettext is actually gettext + FEATURES, and it’s not clear to me if Python’s gettext solves this problem.
>>
> 
> 
> Hey, thanks! That’s great information, and I bet that’s why L20n.js (what we’re currently using.. but it’s client side so we need to decide if that’s OK and if it is if the browser support is OK) lets you sort of program your translations a bit.

Any stats on how many visitors have Javascript turned off?


> An example from the L20n website is here http://l20n.org/learn/putting-it-all-together-complex-plurals-example/
> 
> I’m not sure how to tell if Python’s gettext supports that. The documentation says "If a translation is found, apply the plural formula to n, and return the resulting message (some languages have more than two plural forms).” which sounds like it might work like that? I found https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/Plural-forms.html which goes way over my head but it mentions Slavic languages so that seems promising?

Gettext's "ngettext" supports one number per message (translation unit),
and  which is good enough for most UI cases. So you can translate "I'm
34 years old" perfectly, but "remaining time: 5 hours 3 minutes 1
second" is not possible. (The good news is that it's impossible to
represent using ngettext, even in English: the translator can't end up
with a piece of text that can't be translated well.)