Translating to Languages with Irregular Rules

Question

In order to make a PHP content management system extensible, language translations are crucial. I was researching programming approaches for a translations system, and I thought that Qt Linguist was a good example.

This is an example usage from the Qt documentation:

int n = messages.count();
showMessage(tr("%n message(s) saved", "", n));

Qt uses known language rules to determine whether "message" has an "s" appended in English.

When I brought that example up with my development team, they discovered an issue that jeopardizes the extensibility effectiveness of modeling off of Qt's tr() function.

This is a similar example, except that something is now seriously wrong.

int n = deadBacteria.count();
showMessage(tr("%n bacterium(s) killed", "", n));

The plural of "bacterium" is "bacteria". It is improper to append an "s".

I don't have much experience with Qt Linguist, but I haven't seen how it handles irregular conjugations and forms.

A more complicated phrase could be "%n cactus(s) have grown.". The plural should be "cactii", and "have" needs to be conjugated to "has" if there is one cactus.

You might think that the logical correction is to avoid these irregular words because they are not used in programming. Well, this is not helpful in two ways:

1. Perhaps there is a language that modifies nouns in an irregular way, even though the source string works in English, like "%n message(s) saved". In MyImaginaryLanguage, the proper way to form the translated string could be "1Message saved", "M2essage saved", "Me3ssage saved" for %n values 1, 2, and 3, respectively, and it doesn't look like Qt Linguist has rules to handle this.
2. To make a CMS extensible like I need mine to be, all types of web applications need to be factored in. Somebody may build a role-playing game that requires sentences to be constructed like "5 cacti have grown." Or maybe a security software wants to say, "ClamAV found 2 viruses." as opposed to "ClamAV found 2 virus(es)."

After searching online to see if other Qt developers have a solution to this problem and not finding any, I came to Stack Overflow.

I want to know:

1. What extensible and effective programming technique should be used to translate strings with possible irregular rules?
2. What do Qt programmers and translators do if they encounter this irregularity issue?

Answer 1

You've misunderstood how the pluralisation in Qt works: it's not an automatic translation.

Basically you have a default string e.g. "%n cactus(s) have grown." which is a literal, in your code. You can put whatever the hell you like in it e.g. "dingbat wibble foo %n bar".

You may then define translation languages (including one for the same language you've written the source string in).

Linguist is programmed with the various rules for how languages treat quantities of something. In English it's just singular or plural; but if a language has a specific form for zero or whatever, it presents those in Linguist. It then allows you to put in whatever the correct sentence would be, in the target translation language, and it handles putting the %n in where you decide it should be in the translated form.

So whoever does the translation in Linguist would be provided the source, and has to fill in the singular and plural, for example.

Source text: %n cactus(s) have grown.

English translation (Singular): %n cactus has grown.

English translation (Plural): %n cacti have grown.

If the application can't find an installed translation then it falls back to the source literal. Also the source literal is what the person translating sees so has to infer what you meant from it. Hence "dingbat wibble foo %n bar" might not be a good idea when describing how many cacti have grown.

Further reading:

• The Linguist manual
• The Qt Quarterly article on Plural Form(s) in Translation(s)
• The Internationalization example or the I18N example
• Download the SDK and have a play.