Anything beyond that, in particular, “n items of foo” doesn’t have a good solution.

Calendar has some great examples in stuff like “2nd Friday in the month” etc. Those are just horrible in a host of languages, and on top of getting a system that supports such cases in the backend, finding the right UI and UE for localizers to actually fill that out is yet another challenge.

But, what if multiple forms of a word exist that should be used in different context. Frankly, I have no examples here, so you are probably right. I am just trying to be as general as possible. Your note provides the best clarification.

Also, your comments about general localization are great. The world of localization has many nuances that are great challenges to be solved one day.

Plurals are either very simple in English, French and Asian languages or very complex Polish, Slovenian (I think) and Arabic (6 forms). Mostly they’re well documented and formulated. There seem to only be about 10 forms with Eastern European languages having the most variations.

Nice thing about plurals is that computers can help here and the problem is solved. Although we seem to keep solving it. Gettext has had it since 2000 I think. KDE has managed plurals for a very long time. Qt has introduced plural handling in I think v4. Mozilla’s own .properties have it solved also, I don’t think DTDs have is solved though. Most of these solutions require an editing tool to hide the complexity from the user.

The folks developing the CLDR and Unicode have started formulating this data quite well. Also handling soft cases like ‘no files’, ‘many files’

Challenge 4: This is an area where few people venture.

In terms of sizes. This is a problem of the UI tookit in our case XUL. It shouldn’t be a localisation issue. The toolkit should be able to adjust to the requirements of the language. Changing entries that say “35em” is prone to errors.

Some other examples that can affect localisation

* Dates and Time: different calendars and different times. Swahili time starts with zero hours being six in the morning, very much like time in the bible. We can localise dates but many people have different date systems such as the Ethiopians who had their year 2000 bug in about 2005.
* Sounds: what noise does an animal make in your language?
* Pictures: The GNOME icon in Thailand is problematic since showing a foot is offensive.
* Jokes: Our about:robots page is completely untranslatable in most languages, unless your Hungarian with a rich scifi tradition.
* Yes/No: some languages change the terms depending on the question. Irish being one of them.
* Tone of address: while Firefox could be quite chatty in Afrikaans its a machine so it won’t have a close personal relationship with you. So the translation of you become ‘U’ not the informal ‘jy’. Not a technical problem but problematic for new translators. In other languages there are more levels e.g. Nepali has 4.

Ah the world of localisation.

Most of the time we have to accept compromises to fit our localization in the existing UI. Unfortunately this is a problem that can’t be solved by L20n, but can be minimized with a good UI design.