Issues using poEdit

Last updated July 25, 2010.

The translation tool poEdit for Windows seems to require some additional steps to recognize plural forms: if you try to edit a term which has plurals, even if you translate it, it doesn't appear in poedit when you move to another term, as usual, and even if you save, it doesn't.

Plurals Solution #1

If you find a plural term, close poedit, open the file you were translating with a normal text editor (not MS Word) and search for "plural" in it, you find something similar to this:

simply translate the text in msgid (singular form) into msgstr[0], and the text in msgid_plural (plural form) into msgstr[1], save the file, close the editor and return to poedit. Even better, you can do this BEFORE starting to translate the rest of the file with poedit, translating every occurrence of plural in the same way, in every file, and THEN start using poedit. This way, you will find those strings already translated in poedit.

Plurals Solution #2

To use plurals in PO edit you can start with the catalog setting for English and then modify to suit. The syntax is:

nplurals=2; plural=(n != 1);

which gave me what I needed in Swedish translation of:

#: modules/aggregator.module:100;711;722
msgid "1 item"
msgid_plural "items"
msgstr[0] "1 inlägg"
msgstr[1] "%count inlägg"

I tested this in PO Edit 1.3.1 and got the proper GUI response and saved without error.

Plurals Solution #3

The plural forms to use in PO edit under catalog-settings where you see

nplural=INTEGER; plural=EXPRESSION

Only one form: Some languages only require one single form. There is no distinction between the singular and plural form. An appropriate header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0;

Languages with this property include:

Finno-Ugric family
Hungarian

Asian family
Japanese, Korean

Turkic/Altaic family
Turkish

Two forms, singular used for one only: This is the form used in most existing programs since it is what English is using. A header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n != 1;

Note: this uses the feature of C expressions that Boolean expressions have to value zero or one.

Languages with this property include:

Germanic family
Danish, Dutch, English, German, Norwegian, Swedish

Finno-Ugric family
Estonian, Finnish

Latin/Greek family
Greek

Semitic family
Hebrew

Romanic family
Italian, Portuguese, Spanish

Artificial
Esperanto

Two forms, singular used for zero and one: Exceptional case in the language family. The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n>1;

Languages with this property include:

Romanic family
French, Brazilian Portuguese

Three forms, special case for zero: The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n%10==1 && n%100!=11 ? 0 : n != 0 ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Baltic family
Latvian

Three forms, special cases for one and two: The header entry would be:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; plural=n==1 ? 0 : n==2 ? 1 : 2;

Languages with this property include:

Celtic
Gaeilge (Irish)

Three forms, special case for numbers ending in 1[2-9]: The header entry would look like this:

Languages with this property include:

Baltic family
Lithuanian

Three forms, special cases for numbers ending in 1 and 2, 3, 4, except those ending in 1[1-4]: The header entry would look like this:

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family
Croatian, Czech, Russian, Slovak, Ukrainian

Three forms, special case for one and some numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4: The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=3; \

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family
Polish

Four forms, special case for one and all numbers ending in 02, 03, or 04: The header entry would look like this:

Plural-Forms: nplurals=4; \
plural=n%100==1 ? 0 : n%100==2 ? 1 : n%100==3 || n%100==4 ? 2 : 3;

Languages with this property include:

Slavic family
Slovenian

Long plural formulae: Those should not be broken into several lines in the header of the .po file. Drupal expects the formula to be on one line. One could consider this a bug.

I don't think that you can use line breaks in Poedit either. The text is fixed to keep from breaking the site layout. But this:

nplurals=1; plural=ar;

produces an error. The plural form "ar" is not recognized.