Proper l10n of items per page in the screen options

[SergeyBiryukov]

Sites, Users, Comments, Media items and Plugins have their own translation context on the screen options tab, e.g. “sites per page (screen options)”.

To use the right grammatical case, Posts, Pages, Categories and Tags should have that context too.

Related #13673

Refreshed for 3.3.

Also, for proper translation all of these strings should support single and plural forms.

That part won't be implemented, according to nacin's comment on #13673.

The context, however, is still needed, so this is what the patch does.

15576.2.patch​ isn't very backwards compatible. per_page should be implemented like menu_name was -- if it isn't set, it goes forward with the existing "name" argument, rather than defaulting to "Posts"/"Pages".

Replying to nacin:

per_page should be implemented like menu_name was -- if it isn't set, it goes forward with the existing "name" argument, rather than defaulting to "Posts"/"Pages".

Thanks, done in 15576.3.patch​.

As an alternative, we could replace "Posts"/"Pages" with "items" string (15576.4.patch​), which we already have in options-reading.php:
http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/3.4.1/wp-admin/options-reading.php#L111

The use case is essentially the same, so the context might not be needed. 15576.5.patch​ adds it just in case (and uses the uppercased word for consistency with other screens).

With 15576.6.patch​, we could remove 9 strings by making the same change on the other screens (for consistency as well).

Moving to "items" across the board is a decent idea. We can talk about it in 3.6.

To summarize, "20 Записи" (20 Posts) isn't a valid expression in Russian.

It should be "20 записей", but it's currently impossible to use the proper translation due to the lack of context. I imagine Czech (according to pavelevap's comments on #13673) and other languages with declensions have the same problem here.

Introducing a new post type label just for screen options seems like an overkill, hence the "Items" suggestion.

Refresh.

15576.7.patch​ refreshes .6

Standardizing to 'Items' was a nice idea, great to remove some strings.

I'd like translators to weigh in on whether they can work with having one string and context for all of these. Perhaps there are some langs without a convenient generic term like Items that covers all of these cases.

Replying to ryan:

Perhaps there are some langs without a convenient generic term like Items that covers all of these cases.

If 15576.7.patch​ is too drastic, we could go with 15576.5.patch​ to just fix the lack of context for Posts/Pages/Categories/Tags.

15576.7.patch​, however, seems more consistent, since the use case in all the instances is the same.

I also really like the idea of one generic term, but:

1) There are some different plural forms, for example in Czech there are "4 položky" and "5 položek". There is no problem for default 20 items, but I am not sure about other languages...

2) It would be very helpfull for translators to manipulate with order, something like "% Items", so we could do for example "Number of Items: %". This is without problems in most languages, because we can use some internal localization "hacks".

And what about to change the string "Items" to "Number of Items:" or "Number of Items per page:" and move it before number selection? It would be more explanatory, there is enough space, etc. And also much better for translators, because there are not problems with different plurals.