Plurals

What are plurals ?

Plurals are a standardized way to deal with numbers, for example the English language deal with 2 plurals: "one" (1) and "other" (0, 2, 3, ..).

If you were to have

{
  "items": "{{ count }} items"
}

this would produce "1 items", which is not good English.

This can be solved by defining 2 plural forms:

{
  "items_one": "{{ count }} item",
  "items_other": "{{ count }} items"
}

Providing the count to the t! macro, this will result in:

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
let i18n = use_i18n();

t!(i18n, items, count = || 0) // -> "0 items"
t!(i18n, items, count = || 1) // -> "1 item"
t!(i18n, items, count = || 4) // -> "4 items"
}

{{ count }} is a special variable when using plurals, even if you don't interpolate it you ust supply it:

{
  "items_one": "one item",
  "items_other": "some items"
}

This will still need you to supply the count variable: t!(i18n, items, count = ...).

Why bother ?

Why bother and not just do

#![allow(unused)]
fn main() {
if item_count == 1 {
    t!(i18n, items_one)
} else {
    t!(i18n, items_other, count = move || item_count)
}
}

Because all languages don't use the same plurals!

For example in French, 0 is considered singular, so this could produce "0 choses" instead of "0 chose", which is bad French (except in certain conditions, because French, exceptions are everywhere).

Ordinal plurals

What I describe above are "Cardinal" plurals, but they don't work with like "1st place", "2nd place", ect..

The English language use 4 ordinal plurals, and French 2:

• one: "1st place", "21st place"
• two: "2nd place", "22nd place"
• few: "3rd place", "33rd place"
• other: "4th place", "5th place", "7th place"

And French:

• one: "1ère place"
• other: "2ème place", "21ème place"

You can use them by using the _ordinal suffix:

{
  "key_ordinal_one": "{{ count }}st place",
  "key_ordinal_two": "{{ count }}nd place",
  "key_ordinal_few": "{{ count }}rd place",
  "key_ordinal_other": "{{ count }}th place"
}

the _ordinal suffix is removed, in this example you access it with t!(i18n, key, count = ..)

How to know which to use:

There are resources online to help you find what you should use, my personal favorite is the unicode CLDR Charts.

What if I need multiple counts ?

If you need multiple counts, for example:

{
  "key": "{{ boys_count }} boys and {{ girls_count }} girls"
}

There isn't a way to represent this in a single key, you will need Foreign keys that you can read about in a next chapter.

Activate the feature

To use plurals in your translations, enable the "plurals" feature.