Hi Nicolas, Interesting! I see that, in a lot of UI texts, 0 is indeed a special case. It indeeds feels more natural to say “No files copied” than “0 files copied”.
This is not always the case though. “Distance to target: 0 kilometers” is arguably better than “Distance to target: No kilometers”. Then there is cases where you might still go for numbers, for instance if it helps keeping things consistent: It’s at least not clear cut that “3 errors, no warnings” is preferred over “3 errors, 0 warnings”. All in all, I therefore think that the special handling of 0 is a choice that depends on style and context, and not a hard rule defined in the language. As such, I don’t think it would be a good fit for the plural infrastructure we currently have in QTranslator, which is based on objective properties of the languages, as defined e.g. in the CDLR. Having said that: Do you have ideas how to better support this use case without just changing the plural rules? How would you approach it , keeping in mind that we have to keep backwards compatibility? Kai Confidential From: Development <[email protected]> on behalf of Nicolas Fella via Development <[email protected]> Date: Thursday, 30. April 2026 at 20:36 To: [email protected] <[email protected]> Subject: [Development] Alternative plural forms for English (and similar) Hi, it should be pretty well-known that plurals are a complex topic when it comes to translating. While languages like English and German generally only distinguish between Singular and Plural, other languages can have more complex rules. Qt supports all of that, so far so good. However, even with English or German there are more subtleties involved. When having zero items of something the plural form is used: "0 unread messages" is a perfectly grammatical sentence. It often reads nicer to instead have "No unread messages" instead though. It's possible to achieve that with Qt by an additional if check and using a different string, but this doesn't scale with the number of strings to be translated and might clash with languages with more complex rules. Instead it would be nice if Qt's translation system supported this natively. From the translator's point of view this effectively becomes an additional plural form (n==0). I've had a look at how hard it would be to extend Qt to support that. It appears that the QtCore side is flexible enough to handle this and reads the rules from the qm file, so it's "just" a matter of teaching lupdate/lrelease about the alternative plural rules. I've successfully hacked those to change the rules for English-ish languages to achieve this, but it would probably need to be opt-in in order to not break existing users that don't want this. Before I spend more time on this, is this something that Qt would be willing to support/accept? Are there any other considerations that I should be aware of? Cheers Nico -- Development mailing list [email protected] https://lists.qt-project.org/listinfo/development
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