Should untranslated file be using "other" value for pluralized strings?

[jcbwlkr]

This is more of a question than a bug report. Given that I am starting a new project which I will want to serve in English and German let's say I start with this file

~/i18n ᐳ cat en-US.all.json 
[
  {
    "id": "point_count",
    "translation": {
      "one": "Only {{ .Count }} Point...",
      "other": "{{ .Count }} Points!"
    }
  }
]

When I generate the untranslated file I get this

~/i18n ᐳ goi18n *all.json
~/i18n ᐳ cat de-de.untranslated.json 
[
  {
    "id": "point_count",
    "translation": {
      "one": "{{ .Count }} Points!",
      "other": "{{ .Count }} Points!"
    }
  }
]

If I send that to be translated they won't know how English handles the one case to generate an appropriate German translation. This seems to be expected by the test files under goi18n/testdata/expected/ but it was unexpected to me. Is this intended?

Thanks!

[nicksnyder]

Good question @jcbwlkr; this is intentional.

You are assuming that the "one" category corresponds to the number "1" in all languages; it doesn't. For example, the "one" category in Belarusian corresponds to most numbers that end in the digit "1". You probably don't intend to have the sentence "Only 100001 Points!" in Belarusian.

The same is true for all the other categories: "zero" doesn't necessarily mean "0" and "two" doesn't necessarily mean "2".

If you want to use different variations of a sentence for specific numbers, you can't rely on plural categories so you need to put this logic in code. Each translation should represent a single formation of a sentence.

switch points {
case 0:
  T("zeroPoints") // "No points!"
case 1:
  T("onePoint") // "Only 1 point..."
default:
  T("manyPoints", points) // "{{ .Count }} Points!"
}

Make sense?

[jcbwlkr]

@nicksnyder makes sense. Thanks for clearing that up.