Question

what should be the best approach to make strings for different languages? I have this problem, I am trying to display strings such as ‘month’, ‘months’, ‘year’, ‘years’. Currently I am working on 3 languages I know: spanish, english and polish. For english and spanish this is straight forward. But for instance, in polish ‘years’ can become ‘lata’ (after numbers 2 – 4) or ‘lat’ (after numbers from 5). I was thinking on adding an extra string for this, and making it empty in the other languages. However this made me think about the other languages I don’t know, which might have even more differences. Which should be the best approach in this case, if I am considering adding more languages in the future?

Answer 1

Sounds like you want a ChoiceFormat, or at least using one through a MessageFormat:

public static void main(String... args) {
    String[] formats = { 
        // NOTE - In a real app, you'd fetch the format strings from a language,
        // file, not hard-code them in your program. Obviously.
        "{0,number} {0,choice,0#years|1#year|1<years}", // english
        "{0,number} {0,choice,0#años|1#año|1<años}", // spanish
        "{0,number} {0,choice,1#[fewer than 2]|2#lata|4<lat}", // polish
        "{0,number} år", // swedish - singular and plural forms look the same!
    };
    int[] years = {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6};
    for (int year : years) {
        for (String format : formats) {
            System.out.println(MessageFormat.format(format, year));
        }
        System.out.println();
    }
}

In your program, you would of course get the format string from your string file.