What are common patterns for handling possible pluralization in message properties?

Posted by C. Ross on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by C. Ross
Published on 2013-11-03T01:04:53Z Indexed on 2013/11/03 4:11 UTC
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Obviously users like to see text properly pluralized, and pluralization schemes vary in the various written languages one may encounter. When internationalizing an app, what pattern(s) are useful for handling messages with possible pluralization? What about messages with multiple possible pluralization?

For example: "N review(s):"

One pattern would be

reviews.title.singular="{0} review:" reviews.title.singular="{0} reviews:"

And this may not support all languages.

Or a more complicated case: "Found M question(s) with N comment(s)." This would be difficult to support in English?

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