Yes, in order to have an effective i18n strategy, you will need to have at least a basic grasp of syntax and morphology.  You probably already know what syntax is; the word itself comes from the Greek meaning “ordering together”.  Morphology, on the other hand, might not be quite so familiar.   A morpheme is a unit of meaning; morphology refers to the study of morphemes.  In simple terms, it refers to how the words of a language are built.  

There may be some surprises waiting for you when dealing with matters of human languages.  Unfortunately, since we all grow up speaking one language or other, we tend to frame our appreciation of these matters within the context of our mother tongue.  This blinds us to the dazzling surprises and twists that have evolved in the structures of human language.  It’s fascinating, but it makes it pretty hard to build generic i18n structures.  Here’s one simple example.

In the last post we had this contrived snippet:

that is part of a page that returns search results of books from an imaginary library.  We’re going to look at just the line that says

We found ${self.result_count} books.

and see if we can make it work a bit better.  Now, the first, obvious thing here is that we’re going to get some slightly strange-looking output depending on the value of self.result_count:

We found 0 books
We found 1 books
We found 2 books

Well, it’s not so bad. And we’ve probably seen exactly that on various websites before.  ”1 books.”    There’s a cheap, quick way out of the cheesiness, and I bet you’ve seen it all over the place:

We found 0 book(s)
We found 1 book(s)
We found 2 book(s)

but most of the time you’ll see something like (forgive the crappy templating language invented for the purposes of this example)

    We found
    <if "self.result_count == 1">
        one book
    <else>
        ${self.result_count} books
    </if>

which seems a bit more reasonable, right?  Well, indeed it is, and it works fine, in English.  And, to be honest, in this case the same structure in this case will work in quite a few languages.  But translate this into Arabic, and you’re in trouble.  The reason is because Arabic doesn’t just have the concept of “singular” (as in, “one book”) and “plural” (as in “3 books”), but also has the concept of “dual” (as in “two books”), which is often morphologically different (indeed sometimes a totally different word!).

Continuing with our example, the word in Arabic (transliterated into the latin alphabet here to make a point) for “book” is “ketaab”.  The word for “two books” is “ketaabain”.  The word for “books” (more than two) is “kutuub”.   So in Arabic, you’d need a more complicated template to capture that nuance.  To get a real picture of how complicated it can be, check out the Wikipedia article on grammatical number; it’s pretty mind-blowing.

It’s easy to invent another example that breaks profoundly, even in a language as familiar to many of us as Spanish. 

Let’s say we’re writing a web-based multiplayer text adventure kind of like the old Zork games, and the player has been given a new object by another player.  In English, we could imagine something like this:

Gollum has given you a magic ring.

Gandalf has given you a magic cow.

which seems pretty simple.  We could use some kind of string formatting, with a format string like this:

“%s has given you a %s”

and it’s not hard to see how that should suffice in English.  Translating that to Spanish, we would have

“%s te ha dado un %s”

and inserting the words for “magic cow” (“vaca mágica”) and “magic ring” (“anillo mágico”) we get

Gollum te ha dado un anillo mágico.

Gandalf te ha dado un vaca mágica.

and guess what?  It doesn’t work.  ”Vaca mágica” is feminine, so it needs a different word for “a” in front of it.   See how easily these things fall apart?  And here’s the best thing about this example:  it doesn’t even work in English.   What happens when the object you’re being given starts with a vowel?

Gollum has given you a apple-flavoured gummi bear.

“A apple-flavoured gummi bear”?

This stuff is hard.