How to achieve a "generic plural"?

[MichalBryxi]

Problem definition

Thinking about cases where for plural forms it's not possible to say what the value for count is. Imagine a table where a column is expected to have a heading comments and the cells just show number telling you how many comments are there for the individual rows.

I would say that it makes sense to have a translation record looking like:

{count, plural, =1 {comment} other {comments}}

Now the question is how to request "a plural" in the code?

<th>
  {{t "comment" count=???}}
</th>

What would be the value for count? count=2 works in English, but for example for Czech it would need to be count=5. And possibly many other numbers for other languages. From the ICU spec it seems like other is used in those cases?

Question

So I guess the questions I have are:

• From language perspective, is there a rule that would say "when you don't know the count, use two / few / many / other?
• Whatever the correct form to use for generic plural is, is there a way to pass that down to the t helper? Something like: {{t "comments" count="other"}}

Other option

Also I could potentially just have a plural form entry in the translation file and request that directly:

{{t "comments"}}

It just feels off that I have to duplicate these every time and that there would no rule for such case?

[longlho]

I'm not sure I understand your question. First of all you shouldn't force =1 but use one instead.
In terms of {count, plural, =1 {comment} other {comments}} what do you mean by request "a plural"? What's your expected input & output?

[gnclmorais]

In my case, emails, names, and phone numbers are dynamic, i.e., they are “summaries” of fields that might (or not) be present on the data that we show after that sentence; so they are translated in separate.

[longlho]

So can you just declare emails, names, phone numbers as is with that context and translators take care of that? I don't think it relies on plural form per se.

[MichalBryxi]

To put the above example in code, I guess as a simplified code it can be something like:

{{t "The following table has:}}

{{#each @types as |type|}}
  {{t type}}
{{/each}}

So can you just declare emails, names, phone numbers as is

I'm not sure what would that mean, but I read this as: Put emails, names and phone numbers directly as keys in the translation files? In other words the "other option" from my original question.

[longlho]

yeah, and join them w/ ListFormat

[MichalBryxi]

Oh ok. That sounds like a reasonable solution. Thanks for the discussion/explanation! 🌟 🙇🏾

To put it into code for someone coming by:

get typesString() {
  const typesTranslated = this.args.types.map((type) => this.intl.t(type));
  return new Intl.ListFormat('en', { style: 'long', type: 'conjunction' }).format(typesTranslated);
}

{{t "The following table has: {types}" types=this.typesString}}

[MichalBryxi]

// Extracted from a discussion above:

The generic plural doesn't really exist since it depends on the default plural AND gender form of words in a language (e.g some lang by default assume gender/plurality of things to be male/plural while other female/singular depending on what that thing is).

You just declare emails, names, phone numbers as is with that context and translators take care of that. And join them w/ ListFormat.

// this.args.types = ['emails', 'names', 'phone numbers];
get typesString() {
  const typesTranslated = this.args.types.map((type) => this.intl.t(type));
  return new Intl.ListFormat('en', { style: 'long', type: 'conjunction' }).format(typesTranslated);
}

{{t "The following table has: {types}" types=this.typesString}}