[Localization] Arabic translation

[Khaled Hosny]

Hi all,


On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 02:48:30PM +0200, Simon Schampijer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> in the arabic translation I found items that look wrong the translations 
> should include the '%d' days, weeks, months (أسبوع%.0s) [1]. And 
> actually, why do we have several forms here, are there languages that 
> have more than one singular and plural form? And which one is picked by 
> gettext if?

Please check [1] for explanations about handling of plural forms in
gettext.

As for the %.0s, we are using it as place holder since the first three
plural forms in Arabic (0, 1 and 2) should not contain the numeral value
as the Arabic word used already denote the number. %.0s will just print
nothing (a zero length string), it is just a hack to prevent application
crashing. A better solution is to used named variable, %(week)d or
something, and this will allow reordering and omitting unused
variables, which is often needed in translations.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/hello/manual/gettext/Plural-forms.html

Regards,
 Khaled

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer