I can tell you that languages can be so different that even simple
assumptions are no longer valid.
For example, most languages in Europe have a singular and plural,
at least those of Indo European origin. For English, adding "s" or "es"
is sufficient in most cases, and if you want to do a porter stemmer,
you take that out (oversimplifying, but you get the idea).
In Arabic, there is singular, dual and plural. And then there is masculine
and feminine version of each of those. So the assumptions made for
English no longer carries over well to Arabic.
I doubt if the "th" concept even exists in many languages. Not being a
language scholar I can't give explicit examples. It is usually possible to
word messages so you don't use the "th" concept. This seems like a better
approach.
-----Original Message-----
From: development-bounces@drupal.org [mailto:development-bounces@drupal.org]
On Behalf Of Earnie Boyd
Sent: Thursday, May 03, 2007 8:56 AM
To: development@drupal.org
Subject: Re: [development] Translatable strings for 1st/2nd/3rd/nth
Quoting Chris Kennedy <chrisken@mail.utexas.edu>:
> Does anyone have suggestions for creating translatable strings for
rankings?
>
> I need to generate strings for 1st/2nd/3rd/4th/etc. ideally without a
> limit, but don't know of a simple translatable solution.
>
> Right now I just have individual t() strings for 1st/2nd/3rd, then a
> blanket t($i .'th') for the rest, under the untested theory that
> translators could manually add translations for Nth into their .po
> files up to a reasonable limit. I realize that this will not work for
> extractor.php purposes and is English-centric.
>
> Thoughts?
>
Are there existing math libraries that might help? Simple solution might be
a SQL table that you add the exceptions to 'th' to. So the translation for
1 would contain 1st and the translation for 2 would 2nd and your 'th'
default would be suffixed for everything else.
Earnie
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