As of Zend Framework 1.9, Zend_Translate is able to provide plural support. Professional translation will always have the need to use plurals as they are native in almost all languages.

So what are plurals? Generally spoken plurals are words which take into account numeric meanings. But as you may imagine each language has it's own definition of plurals. English, for example, supports one plural. We have a singular definition, for example "car", which means implicit one car, and we have the plural definition, "cars" which could mean more than one car but also zero cars. Other languages like Russian or Polish have more plurals and also the rules for plurals are different.

When you want to use plurals with Zend_Translate you must not need to know how the plurals are defined, only the translator must know as he does the translation. The only information you need to have is the language.

There are two ways for using plurals... the traditional one, which means that you use a own method, and a modern one, which allows you to do plural translations with the same method as normal translations.