RE: [xliff] XLIFF 2.0 + ICU messages in Angular

["Yoshito Umaoka" <yoshito_umaoka@us.ibm.com>]

I'm curious what is recommended _expression_
for this type of message in XLIFF.
I think contacting Angular folks
is OK, but I'm not sure XLIFF working group has any reasonable suggestion
ready.


The biggest problem is, each sub
pattern is associated with a plural category (zero/one/two/few/many/others),
and appropriate set of categories depends on target language.

So for example, default set of categories
used by English is [one] and [others].

one: A file will be deleted.
others: %d files will be deleted.

In Japanese, it will be turned into
a single category - others, while Russian translation requires 4 categories
- one/few/many/others.

At this moment, I'm not sure if XLIFF
provide any reasonable framework to handle these categories.


Another complexity of plural format
is that a developer may special case pattern for specific number. For example
-

0: No users enters the room.
one: {0} enters the room.
2: {0} and {1} enter the room.
3: {0}, {1} and {2} enter the room.
others: {0}, {1}, {2} and others
enter the room.


I heard some companies (I believe
it was Google) discourage developers to use categories other than default
categories, because it makes translation extremely difficult. I thought
Google person mentioned they do have internal translation tool that automatically
populate default categories for each target language.

In IBM, we also integrate helper
tool for translation to produce proposed plural categories and also validating
translation result.


I'm participating Unicode CLDR project
and ICU project. I don't have bandwidth to participate Message Format Working
Group, which was created under CLDR project.
How to map such complicated construction
to XLIFF is our interest, and I'm sure David is participating the working
group because of this.

David, do you have any insights?


-Yoshito