Japanese plurals

[Markus Scherer]

On Wed, Dec 1, 2021 at 11:22 AM Edwin Hoogerbeets via CLDR-Users <
cldr-users at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> Our Japanese translators are asking me how to translate the following
> string resource:
>
> {folderCount, plural, one {Remove yourself from this shared folder.} other
> {Remove yourself from these shared folders.}}
>
> Our translation management system only allows for the "other" case in
> Japanese because it follows the CLDR rules as documented in
> common/supplemental/plurals.xml. The difficult thing is that the two
> English strings should be translated differently. Counters may not have
> plurals in Japanese, but demonstratives like "this", "these", "that" and
> "those" do.
>
> What the translators would like is to do a translation like this:
>
> {folderCount, plural, one {*この*共有フォルダから自分を削除します。} other {*これらの*
> 共有フォルダから自分を削除します。}}
>
> (Bold added by me to highlight the translations of "this" and "these".)
>
There is a better way to do this.
The "one" case triggers for different sets of numbers depending on the
language, and usually not just for exactly one item. Even if you changed
the plural rules for Japanese, the message would not make sense for, say,
Russian, where "one" is used for 1, 21, 31, 41, ...

What you want is an "exactly numerically 1" case, and if you are using ICU
MessageFormat, you can do that with

{folderCount, plural, *=1* {Remove yourself from this shared folder.} other
{Remove yourself from these shared folders.}}


Best regards,
markus
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