The UX of Language
summary
Concatenating strings for UI sentences produces embarrassing UX and explodes when plurals, gender, contexts or multiple counts appear; gettext/PO files handle basic plurals but fail for multiple numeric slots. The usable solution is ICU MessageFormat and libraries like messageformat.js and Jed to express plural/select/offset/named-arg rules, compile them to precompiled JS, and ship translator-friendly message bundles; the compiled approach proves fast and keeps locale rules out of templates while avoiding dozens of ad hoc if branches.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:27Preface
- 8:11Poor User Experience
- 13:15Properties Files
- 16:38Plural Forms
- 26:01Message Format
- 30:06Multiple Languages
- 33:13Message Formatting
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