One simple example is slavic languages where you have different forms of plural depending on the number.

pluralization is much MUCH more complex in many languages than in English: https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/47/supplemental/language...

it can largely be turned into six categories of behavior, with tons of languages choosing different boundaries for those categories. ios/osx and android have tools for this, and probably others (I'm just personally familiar with these).

and even English isn't even that simple in the way many treat it - you don't pluralize sentences, parts of sentences change in contrast to each other (a car drives vs cars drive). so e.g. widely used APIs like https://apidock.com/rails/v7.1.3.4/String/pluralize are blatantly misleading merely by existing, and it leads to mistakes in many (most?) languages, and also English, even though the authors of the API speak English.

That has to be one of the most cursed functions that I've heard of in my life. Anything less than a call to ChatGPT is doomed to fail.

It is a solved problem with tools that help to do it right, but nobody does it right. People wrote that cursed function for every language long time ago, but you as a developer need to know it exists and use it

yeah, I mean `toUpper(string)` exists in basically every language and it's equally cursed. it's nothing even slightly new, just another sigh-inducer when you see people using it.

Making it plural doesn't always mean "replace one word by another".

The right thing to do it:

add_one = "Add one thing" add_multiple = "Add {n} things"

Then you'll provide the full sentence for each language. Of course some languages will need more cases, like slavic language where it's 1, 2-4, 5+, so depending on the languages you need to support you need to put more than 2 strings.

Not the parent, but you use a translation format like `translations("INVITE_USER", {gender_of_host, num_guests})`

Then you will have an algorithm that knows to translate based on some rules - like the ICU messages format - https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/format_parse/mes...

In the link there's an example of how such rules look like (they'll be different for each language)

For example, in Arabic, nouns have three forms: singular, dual, and plural. Dual and plural are not interchangeable.

Polish has different plurals for [2:4],[5:21], then [2n+2 : 2n+4], [2n+5 : 2n+11], restarting at 2n = 100

1 osoba

2, 3, 4 osoby

5, 6, 15, 21 osób

22 osoby

25 osób

101, 112 osób