Translate a string to a language with masculin/feminine nouns

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So in english we don’t have gendered nouns. It is always “a table” or “a desk” with no need to worry about it being “une table” or “un tableau” (french). So my question is that when working on the french .mo file, how does one translate a string such as :

You can include a %s in a childtheme

since the “a” depends on what the %s is?

2 s
2

This is not a problem if every string gets its own template for translation.

If you use the string You can include a %s in a childtheme. more than one time for different nouns it is not translatable.

An example, taken from a recent article: New %s is in German (yes, we have gendered nouns too) …

  • Neues Buch (for a book, neutral)
  • Neuer Film (for a movie, masculine)

… so you have to write New book and New movie or You can include a logo in a child theme. and You can include a stylesheet in a child theme..

Side note

That’s one of the reasons why translation files take so much memory: You have to “repeat” many very similar strings. While a WordPress installation in English will probably run fine with 32MB PHP memory it will just die if you use the same with a German or French translation.

If your theme or plugin is using many translatable strings for front-end and back-end consider using two files: one for the back-end and a separate file for the front-end. 

load_theme_textdomain( 
    'your_text_domain', 
    get_template_directory() . '/languages' . ( is_admin() ? '/backend' : '/frontend' )
);

The WordPress core just changed to this system for better performance.

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