How to do an app with truly multilingual strings?

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\'.

Answer 1

Thanks to the answers I have got, I am writing 2 Android based solutions. The first one I used was having plurals. At first glance checking the Plurals docs/examples, you could think that there is a quantity="few" (for 2-4 plurals) which checking at the sources only works for locale 'cs'. For the rest of locales, only "one" and "other" are working. So in your strings.xml files:

    1 year
    %d years

So for polish I would have:

    1 rok
    %d lat

Then I would have on my code:

int n = getYears(...);
if (Locale.getDefault().getLanguage().equalsIgnoreCase("pl") && n >= 2 && n <= 4) {
   return getString(R.string.years_pl, n);
} else {
   return getResources().getQuantityString(R.plurals.years, n, n);
}

And in my strings.xml file for the polish locale I would add the missing string:

%d lata

My second solution has the plurals element for english, spanish, and other languages that don't have too many plural changes. Then for the rest of the languages that have this kind of changes I would use ChoiceFormat. So in my code:

...
private static final int LANG_PL = 0;
// add more languages here if needed
...
String formats[] = {
"{0,number} {0,choice,1#" + getString(R.string.year_1) + "|2#" + getString(R.string.years_2_4) +  "|4<" + getString(R.string.years_lots) +"}", // polish
// more to come
};
...
// Here I would add more for certain languages
    if (Locale.getDefault().getLanguage().equalsIgnoreCase("pl")) {
       return MessageFormat.format(formats[LANG_PL], n);
    } else {
       return getResources().getQuantityString(R.plurals.years, n, n);
    }

I don't know if these ways are the best way, but for the moment, or until Google makes something better, this works for me.