Plurals for Kurdish

[Carlos Perelló Marín]

First of all. Sorry for the big delay answering.

We (The Rosetta Team) are very busy with the integration of Ubuntu
translations into Rosetta and we were not able to handle all mails we
got.

From now, it will not happen again and we will handle better our time so
all requests are answered as soon as possible.


On Wed, 2004-12-22 at 03:28 +0100, Reimar Heider wrote:
> >>Rosetta told me that it needs information about plurals in Kurdish. I
> >>can give you the information you need. Please contact me using this
> >>adress, I am no subscriber of the list.
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >Please, just send us that information to the mailing list and we will
> >put it into Rosetta.
> >  
> >
> If you could specify WHAT information you need? I think it is about the 
> grammar for plurals in menues and so on.

Well, the rules we need to define are related with the number of
objects/things/persons you are talking about, for instance, in English:

0 items
1 item
2 items
3 items
...
n item(s)

With that, we get that only when n == 1 is singular and when n != 1,
it's plural. In this case, the plural form expression is:
"n==1 ? 0 : 1" and the gettext's nplurals value == 2.

In a non programmer language, "n==1 ? 0 : 1" means:

If 'n' is 1, then use the first entry, otherwise, use the second. 'n' is
the number of items and usually, in computer programming we start
counting with '0' instead of '1' (sorry if you already know all this,
but usually there are translators that are not programmers and it's
normal they don't know it).


What does it means with Rosetta?

If you get a message to translate with plural forms, you will get as
much entries fields as plural forms defined for your language so you
should be aware of your plural form expression and fill the fields as
needed.

> 
> In Kurdish there are two possible plural endings for any given word. 
> (-ên and -an) But there may be no ending at all, too. Examples:
> 
> mirov = human being, human beings (in general, like: We are human beings)
> mirovan = human beings (in flected cases, like: I see a human being)
> mirovên ... = if an adjective, pronoun or a connected word follows. In 
> phrases like: free human beings; human beings' way of life.
> 
> So for i10n, most of the time there is NO ending needed. "Files" and 
> "File" is the same. But "close all files" needs a different ending (-an).

Hmmm, then it depends on the context more on the quantity ?

> 
> By the way, can we register any translation project in the launchpad? 
> For instance the Kurdish translation of Abiword?  I feel that the use of 
> a tool like Rosetta can simplifiy the process for users who are not 
> accustomed to po-files like most windows users.

Since December this has changed a bit.

Now, all Ubuntu packages are being imported automatically into Rosetta,
if you miss anyone, just ping us (the admins) at rosetta at ubuntu.com and
we will review why it's not imported yet.

If you want to translate and upstream project, that's it a project that
is not handled by Ubuntu translation team, and it's not already
available at https://launchpad.ubuntu.com/rosetta/ , send at
rosetta at ubuntu.com an email requesting it with the steps Mark sent some
days ago to this mailing list:


" - make sure the upcoming release is registered in Launchpad (add 
product, add series, add release)
 - mail the URL for the .pot AND ALL PO FILES. This means we can import 
not just one language, but the complete state of upstream, and it 
greatly improves the way we can work with upstream.
"

I'm preparing a Faq page with all this questions so we start having some
documentation.

> 
> Thanks for all your efforts, Ubuntu is great and works fine for me.
> 

Thanks for using Rosetta and Ubuntu.


Cheers.

> 
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Carlos Perelló Marín
Ubuntu Hoary (PowerPC)  => http://www.ubuntulinux.org
mailto:carlos.perello at canonical.com
http://carlos.pemas.net
Valencia - Spain
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