directory is "katalog" in Polish, and it would be:
1 katalog
2 katalogi
3 katalogi
4 katalogi
5 katalogów
6 katalogów
....(it doesn't change for any number greater than 5)
But if you wanted to say "X files were found in Y directories" then you would have to say:
....1 katalogu
....2 katalogach
....3 katalogach
....1000 katalogów
(for 1001 even I am not sure if you should say katalogów or katalogach, both sound correct to me)
...and again, the whole thing changes depending on the speaker being male/female + singular/plural("I have found"/"we have found").
Compared to the grammar of Slavic languages, English is super easy.
I think this has to do with vocabulary registers as well. We've learned to use English words for computer things. Using Slovene translations just feels weird unless they're a bastardisation of the English word. Similar to how English uses French words for foods because cuisine was a thing of the elite and they didn't eat pig, they ate porc.
Things like that are difficult to shake off no matter how well you know a language.
And thus is solved the mystery all us Slavic speakers have such good English. Especially on the online. Because nobody had the guts to localize to our languages.
If they did localize to our languages "Omg this looks weird and smells off", we all cried. And switched our interfaces to English. Admit it, you did this in High School or even Middle School because the <insert slavic language> translation just didn't make sense.
And so all of us who are now in a position to localize these interfaces don't because it seems silly and pointless.
We come full circle. Younglings after us use computers in English because no good localization exists.
In our mind the English word and its native translation have semantically different meanings. I discover this problem a lot now that I'm older. I understand the words and their translations, but they still mean semantically different things to me in different languages.
The funniest part is how when I'm in the US I know all the English words for pots and pans and stuff, but when I'm home in Slovenia and my girlfriend is here, it becomes almost impossible to translate. Because in Slovenia the pots and pans have Slovenian names, in the US they have English names. And to me those are completely different.
Because they quite often have (I'd wager that more often than not).
To use your example, English "Insert" cuts through a different part of concept-space than Polish "Wstaw" (which is what usually ends up as a menu label). It's a fine translation up until you ask to insert a DVD - now you should say "Wsuń" or "Włóż".
And I don't think this is a problem. As I grow older I realize that this is how it should be. Personally, I think that the moment you stop mapping words from new language to the words of your native is when you actually start to be proficient in the language you're learning. Having mappings like "fork" -> "widelec" -> "<that pointy metal thing you use to eat>" in your head is totally wrong way to use the language. "fork" and "widelec" are two different labels referring to two different areas of concept-space, that happen to intersect somewhere in the area where you think about eating utensils.
That's why I keep my internal monologue (and speech, if people I'm talking with don't mind) switching constantly between English and Polish - there are concepts I can express with one language that I can't express in another, and any attempt at translation feels like lossy compression.
(and then I get tons of hate for occasionally saying "robi sens" instead of "ma sens"; I know what the proper translation of "makes sense" is, but the Polish expression emphasizes 'sense' as a property of things while English shows it as something that can be produced, and sometimes the idea I want to express is closer to the English than Polish version)
The problem arises when your girlfriend (or friend or whatever) visits you in the homeland and you suddenly find yourself struggling to find words because many of the things at home don't have English names. It becomes even worse when you have to act as translator between them and your family who doesn't speak English or doesn't speak it as well.
Yes, I had a lot of fun over the holidays ...
Even something as simple as "Did your mum like me?" becomes difficult to translate because your mum said X and X doesn't quite translate into English with all the connotations preserved.
Yeah, I can totally imagine it :D.
Another thing is that the mini-language grows complex enough that the resulting text can be quite hard to read and understand:
{people, plural, offset:1 =0{No one went.} =1{{user1} went.} =2{{user1} and {user2} went}.} other{{user1} and # others went}}.
(case (length folks) (0 "No one went.")
(1 ((elt 0 folks) " user went."))
(2 ((elt 0 folks) " and " (elt 1 folks) " went."))
(otherwise ((elt 0 folks) " and " (length folks) " others went.")))
Also, I advocate closer work between translators and developers. Let the translators give the text and explain corner cases to someone who can code up the logic.
BTW. Lisp is only hard for people who acquired this stupid meme that "Lisp is weird/for crazy people". You'd be hard-pressed to find something which is simpler in terms of syntax and readability.
The way L10ns try to mitigate the complexity of the markup language is to provide buttons for pasting the correct markup for translators. Also a developer translates on his own language first. And this example will always be visible to the translator of an another language for easy reference. So the programmer offloads the logic thinking from the translator.
IMO ICU's messageformat markup is also slowly becoming the standard for localizing strings. It is already used widely by big organizations such as Apple, Google and Yahoo.
L10ns pre-compiles all message string. So it offloads the parsing performance.
Because, in Polish, numerals inflect in gender and case, come in two main variants ("normal" and "collective", and that's not including ordinals), and can (but not necessarily have to) for some genders undergo case changes that affect the verb part of the sentence under certain circumstances. Add to this the fact that there's even no definitive consensus on how many grammatical genders there are in Polish (opinions range from 3 to 9, with some of the theories based on numeral connectivity), and you're all set.
The Polish word "dwa" (two) has at least seventeen distinct grammatical forms, each of which has arcane rules that govern its usage.
Not so lucky there either:
....21 katalogów
....22 katalogi
....23 katalogi
....24 katalogi
....25 katalogów
And the same pattern repeats modulo 10.
EDIT: And as I think about the 1001 part... Actually the following sounds right to me (translating "in X directories"):
....w 1000 katalogów (w tysiącu katalogów)
....w 1001 katalogu (w tysiąc-jednym katalogu)
....w 1002 katalogach (w tysiąc-dwóch katalogach)
etc.
http://localization-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/l10n/plu...