whateverthing.com

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Just want to jot this down so I don't forget (and maybe it can help someone else). I spent an inordinate amount of time wrestling with the ZF2 documentation trying to find out how to do pluralized translations, so hopefully you won't have to.

Here is the proper structure for a plural localization in a gettext ".po" file:

msgid "Found %d Result"
msgid_plural "Found %d Results"
msgstr[0] "Found %d Result"
msgstr[1] "Found %d Results"

Some languages might have 1 or 3 (or more) plural forms. If you look in the header of the .po file, there is a line that starts like this that tells you how many plural forms you should localize to:

"Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);\n"

So you can see that "nplurals" is 2 for English. If it were some other language (such as Polish), it might be 3, in which case the localization would look like this:

msgid "Found %d Result"
msgid_plural "Found %d Results"
msgstr[0] "singular localization here"
msgstr[1] "plural localization here"
msgstr[2] "super plural localization here"

This seems to be the proper way to get Zend Framework 2's ->translatePlural() method to work properly. In a view helper, you would invoke it like so:

<h2><?php echo sprintf($this->tp(‘Found %d Result', ‘Found %d Results', $number), $number); ?></h2>

I hope this helps someone out.

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Notes:

• ZF2 Documentation:
  • "Translating Messages" (Not really helping)
  • "Translate Plural Helper" (Also not really helping)
• StackOverflow: "Why an array?" (Unanswered, for now)
• Github Issue: "[RFC] Improve translation of singular and plurals" (Still in RFC)
• Gettext file format:
  • "Helpful comment on php.net" (Now we're getting somewhere)
  • Actual Gettext Docs for Plural-Forms header (An interesting detour that explains why this is built this way)
  • Actual Gettext Docs for plural message strings (Now we've got the full story)

Building a gettext ".mo" file from a ".po" file:

$ msgfmt default.po -o default.mo

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