XPost: comp.lang.c, comp.lang.c++   
   From: ldo@nz.invalid   
      
   On Fri, 23 Jan 2026 21:35:54 -0600, Lynn McGuire wrote:   
      
   > I knew it was bad, but not that bad.   
      
   Back in earlier Web 1.0 days, I developed an online shop system for   
   a client, that had to be localizable for different target markets --   
   different currencies, different languages.   
      
   I developed a templating system, which allowed the code to substitute   
   strings into other strings, making choices according to numbers of   
   items (for singular-versus-plural cases), gender etc. Since the   
   placeholders were substituted by name, not position, this allowed for   
   differences in grammar (e.g. verb-noun ordering).   
      
   As new languages came along with more grammatical peculiarities, I   
   added new templating cases, that could substitute to exactly the same   
   strings for existing languages. For example, a list of items in   
   English might expand to one of   
      
       1 item -- “A”   
       2 items -- “A or B”   
       3 or more items -- “A, B, ... C or D”   
      
   whereas in Japanese, the case with 3 items has to be distinguished   
   from the ones with 4 or more items.   
      
   The hard part was explaining the templating system to translators. I   
   tried giving copious examples of how the substitutions would work in   
   specific cases. As I recall, I still had to do some massaging of the   
   strings they sent back, in some cases having to guess what they meant,   
   and then get them to test the results, to confirm with them that the   
   site was producing the correct messages in all cases.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)