Culture-specific strings pluralization in .NET

Posted by Dmytro Shteflyuk on under ASP.NET

Not so long ago I faced a problem of displaying count of some entities in singular or plural form (“No comments” or “less than a minute ago”, “1 comment” or “a minute ago”, “2 comments” or “2 minutes ago”). It’s very easy for English (there are three variants only), but I’m working on application that should be localized for several cultures. For example, in Russian we have at least 4 forms (“Нет комментариев”, “1 комментарий”, “2 комментария”, “5 комментариев”) and not so obvious rules for plural forms (“11 комментариев”, “111 комментариев”, but “21 комментарий”). I don’t speak any other language, but I think that several of them might be even more complicated than Russian. Here you can find my thoughts about such strings localization.

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