With the years albums documented with some difficulty and consternation, there’s a lot of very good records from this year whose albums were relegated by my fickle editorial to ‘merely good.’ That, or released on EPs that weren’t by Mogwai.

Unlike the albums that I ranked, these are arranged in a somewhat genre and mood themed playlist. The set is available as a handy Spotify playlist.

1. Miles Kane - ‘Come Closer’. Discovered via Last.FM’s ever surprisingly excellent album recommendations, I was unwittingly a fan of Miles Kane for his previous work as one half of Last Shadow Puppets. Rather like that record, ‘Colour of the Trap’ is full of Scott Walker revivalism, and is rather good.
2. British Sea Power - ‘Luna’. ‘Valhalla Dancehall’ was a bit disappointing in the end. There are some excellent pieces, and BSPs live show was great back in the spring, but as a record it was too long and seemed to drift off in the middle. Enjoy ‘Luna’, though. It’s especially worth it for the wry ‘put the fucking kettle on’ lyrics.
3. Los Campesinos! - ‘Hello Sadness’. Los Camp grew up in the past few years, with (inevitable) line-up changes and increasing maturity in their music. Listening to ‘Hello Sadness’—their fourth (yes, fine, third) album—makes me wonder if I would have gotten into them given this album rather than the jovial facade of their first and second releases. It is still good, just a bit buried. Looking forward to the tour in February.
4. Tune-Yards - ‘Powa’. Always struggled a bit with Tune-Yards first record, but WHOKILL is flipping magnificent, and I was very lucky to see her perform live in San Francisco. Witnessing the frankly incredible vocal agility of Merrill Garbus, and the way in which she almost individual puts together the beats and instruments of every song with creative use of loop pedals and mics is pretty astounding.
5. Youth Lagoon - ‘17’. ‘The Year of Hibernation’ was one of my albums of the year, and ‘17’ is a fine representation of it, capturing the sparse, dreamy vocal and building into a bigger, guitar layered conclusion.
6. Mogwai - ‘Hound of Winter’. The ‘Earth Division’ EP was so good I declared it album of the year, and ‘Hound of Winter’ is I think the single best Mogwai-song-with-vocals ever recorded. Like everything on ‘Earth Division’ it’s the string arrangement that elevates it into indescribable territory.
7. The National - ‘Exile Vilify’. In a hidden chamber filled with cryptic graffiti, early in the video game ‘Portal 2’, is a radio. Crawl up close, and from it you will hear The National’s wonderful ‘Exile Vilify’. If you’re noticing a theme of dramatic, indulgent string arrangements in my musical tastes this year, then you’re paying attention. Well done.
8. Radiohead - ‘Codex’. Radiohead had a busy year. ‘The King of Limbs’ as an individual album probably won’t be stand out as boldly as those before it, but still it has its unique stylings. ‘The King of Limbs’ as a year-long project though, is quite impressive: The initial album, quickly followed by a 12” AA (Supercollider/The Butcher), a live recording of the whole record (plus another new song, ‘The Daily Mail’), and then the summer months were taken up with 7 12” remix releases (of variable interestingness.) There are a few items from Radiohead’s output on this playlist, but as someone who did really enjoy TKOL album, ‘Codex’ was a beautiful centerpiece.
9. Battles - ‘Africastle’. Got to see Battles play the entirety of ‘Gloss Drop’ live just prior to the release, with no old material whatsoever. Thankfully ‘Atlas’ was back in the set (along with super-creepy new children’s choir vocals) by the summer festivals, but I am full of respect for a band who lose their singer and then step up in full support of the new material. I will say again that over the course of the album, keyboards that sound like a disturbed Ice Cream truck in every song grate on me somewhat, but in controlled doses, they’ve done good work.
10. Slow Club - ‘If We’re Still Alive’. Possible contender for grower-of-the-year is Slow Club’s sophomore ‘Paradise’. On first listen, after the jubilance of their debut ‘Yeah, So’ I wasn’t just disappointed, but I didn’t really like it. There’s something about the very beginning of ‘Two Cousins’ that totally throws me off every time (the song progresses into something great, mind you.) Anyway, I’m now at the point where although ‘Yeah, So’ has some all-time-classic hits on it, Paradise is probably a consistently better record. Apart from ‘You, Earth, or Ash’, which unfortunately always makes me think of how earthshakingly powerful its predecessor ‘Sorry About The Doom’ was.
11. Florence + The Machine - ‘What the Water Gave Me’. If Slow Club managed the ‘this is shit, no, wait, no it isn’t at all!’ follow-up album, Florence has achieved the corresponding ‘this is shit, oh, yes, it really is a bit’ follow-up album. I appreciate I come to this opinion from the ultra-hip direction of I saw her when she was unsigned and ‘The Machine’ was one guy with an acoustic guitar and no-one had given her a budget to put a fucking harp in every single song yet, but, well, that. ‘What The Water Gave Me’ is really very good, and is therefore a huge cock-tease for an inexplicably long, 15 song album, wherein every track is so squeaky clean and full of huge echoing drums that it all just disappears into a nondescript pop malaise. I find this tragic, given how fantastic her voice can be. Astronomical success will disagree, whilst I shall treasure those early, bluesy, acoustic 7”s from the first record, and we’ll all go our separate ways. But really, fuck harps.
12. Typhoon - ‘Claws Pt. 1’. From a happier place in my heart, Portland 10-to-13-piece Typhoon followed up 2010’s really excellent ‘Hunger and Thirst’ with the ‘A New Kind of House’ EP. It’d probably have put it in my albums of 2011 list but for dragging the entire concept of albums of the year into further disrepute. What I especially love is the way in which the EP reworks lyrics and themes from the album into new songs. ‘Claws Pt. 1’ has a corresponding Part 2 on the album, but ‘The Honest Truth’ also reuses old lyrics to great effect. As much as anything, it’s a really great use of the EP format.
13. Low - ‘Especially Me’. Weirdly, my enjoyment of Low had previously been focused exclusively around ‘Trust’ and ‘The Great Destroyer’ (two outstanding records, no doubt) and buying ‘C’mon’ was a result of coincidental record store browsing and their release date. It’s very good, naturally, but ‘Especially Me’ falls into that category of Low song that I like the most, the stripped back breakdown. It’s a ‘Points of Disgust’, or ‘Death of a Salesman’. And it’s very good.
14. PJ Harvey - ‘In The Dark Places’. All for the conclusion with its rousing, spine-tingling refrain.
15. Radiohead - ‘The Daily Mail’. More Radiohead, then. From their live recording of TKOL came ‘The Daily Mail’, which later got a digital release via their online store. Where a lot of the TKOL release is underpinned by the ever-evolving post-everything Radiohead sound, ‘The Daily Mail’ (which is an older song revisited) comes from time of ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘You and Whose Army?’: Bare, piano-led beginnings, big crescendo finish. Brilliant.
16. The Horrors - ‘Changing The Rain’. The Horrors went from being the most stereotypically scene band in the NME to incredible, post-Joy Division revivalists with their second record, and the third—‘Skying’—continues in that mould (their live set currently consists of alternating between ‘Primary Colours’ and ‘Skying’ tracks.) Where lead-single ‘Still Life’ takes the whole Tears for Fears/Simple Minds thing quite far, ‘Changing The Rain’ is less blatant and has a rather more wonderful synth.
17. Esben And The Witch - ‘Marching Song’. Sinister atmospherics, swirling guitar pedal noise, distant moans, poetic vocal delivery, and the slightly distracting realization that ‘Violet Cries’ has two consecutive opening tracks, rather than a more traditional ‘first track, second track’ approach. Dead good.
18. The Go! Team - ‘Rolling Blackouts’. On the file of ‘albums I really disliked’ sits The Go Team’s ‘Rolling Blackouts’. Somehow just didn’t work for me. Apart from this—the title track—which is a stomping gem of indie-pop pixie dust that channels Le Tigre in a way that makes more sense when you note that I only bought that album this year as well.
19. Grouplove - ‘Love Will Save Your Soul’. I made a day-late frantic edit to the albums-of-the-year post to add Grouplove’s ‘Never Trust A Happy Song.’ I forget why I was on the fence about it. Maybe it seemed too innocent up next to all those moody string arrangements. Maybe that’s why it was so important to edit it back in. More indie-pop gold-dust, an album of optimism and overjoy at life. And a live presence of equal exuberance. ‘Love Will Save Your Soul’ probably has one-too-many guitar solos, but it still presses all the right buttons.
20. Radiohead - ‘Bloom (Jamie xx Rework, Part 3)’. The third Radiohead project of the year was a summer-long remix series, causing me to spend somewhat too much money on 12” remix releases. The TKOLRMX project (7 12” singles, and then a compilation of those 7) was quite fun, albeit a bit of a mixed bag in terms of longevity of the remixes themselves. TKOLRMX7 was quite strange, opening with a remix by everyone’s favourite new producer Jamie xx that lasted a mere 2’27, and seemed… incomplete. A few weeks later, once the compilation album was pressed, TKOLRMX8 was announced as a set of remixes that arrived too late, and lo, here’s a proper 7-minute version. All a bit odd, but thankfully it got released, rather than discarded, because it’s really very, very good.
21. Gil Scott-Heron & Jamie xx - ‘NY Is Killing Me’. On the subject of Jamie xx, his main contribution to the year was a release of ‘We’re New Here’, an ambitious and worthy effort to remix the entirety of Gil Scott-Heron’s recent (and, it transpired, final) record. This incredible transformation of New York is Killing Me emerged at the end of 2010, I think, but since the album dropped in 2011 I’m going to sneak it in, especially since in the album context the preceding ‘Piano Player’ introduction is absolutely perfect. It’s a bigger tune than anything else on ‘We’re New Here’. It’s the peak of the record (which is not to take anything away from the rest of it, it’s really a great achievement.) Also, in the days after Gil Scott-Heron’s death, this had me inspired to go back and listen to the original ‘I’m New Here’ with different ears, and found almost a whole different record.
22. Emmy the Great - ‘Trellick Tower’. I’ve seen a bit of criticism for Emmy the Great’s second album along the lines of it not being as quirky or unique as her first. Perhaps that’s fair: It’s musically a bit more conventional, there are no lyrics about S Club 7, or unexpected interjections of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. On the other hand, the (perhaps excessively) well documented theme of losing a fiancé to God gives it a coherence and authenticity, and lyrically opening song ‘Dinosaur Sex’ manages the most wonderful, inspiring couplet about dock yard cranes you’ll ever hear. ‘Trellick Tower’ is the absolutely concentration of the lost-love theme. It’s stark, brutal. It succeeds in invoking an emotional sympathy in a way that honestly, not a lot of songs do any more.
23. Mogwai - ‘Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)’. Written about substantially in the albums post, ‘Music for a Forgotten Future’ is a soundtrack found on the bonus disc for Mogwai’s 2011 long-player ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will’. I rank it as one of the finest instrumental compositions I’ve ever heard.

Plausibly, the music I listen to in 2012 will be consumed more coherently. But I doubt it.

Hark, a blog post! I don’t write as much as like to. I don’t have a lot of confidence in my writing tone at present, torn between short witticisms on Twitter, and lengthy documentation for technical consumption. That said, I consider the annual indulgence of reviewing the past year’s music as something quite easy to do. This year was quite difficult.

I’m predominantly a listener of albums. I enjoy the form, both physically as records, but also the experience of listening to something over the course of thirty to forty-five minutes. Much of life is frenetic, and there’s something precious in the albums that you can put on and enjoy without intervening every five minutes.

2011, then, appears to have been a weaker year for albums. David Emery noted the same in his review of the year, but I can’t quite put my finger on what happened. I acquired more music this year than last, and have enjoyed the great majority of it. Yet in the great end of year sigh, a lot of those records feel less special in their entirity, less cohesive. Plus, whilst I’m far from the forefront of genre trends, my listening at the end of this year is far more varied in its electronic and dance influences than last year, and the year before that. I’m into that now, especially when it’s all deliciously muddled together. Perhaps that makes very good, but conventional records like Slow Club’s sophomore ‘Paradise’ feel less noteworthy, if no less enjoyable?

There’s a lot in that very good, but… bucket. Austa’s ‘Feel it Break’, The Horrors ‘Skying’, Low’s ‘C’mon’, Papercuts ‘Fading Parade’. All really good. Battles post-Tyondai Braxton ‘Gloss Drop’ was pretty good, too (especially opener ‘Africastle’), although I couldn’t really get over the persistent keyboard tone that sounds so much like a possessed ice cream truck. Emmy The Great’s second record ‘Virtue’ also worked for me, full of charm, albeit without the quirks of her first.

So in the hunt for things that really stood above, I have four, and bravely I’m going to rank them.

4: Grouplove - ‘Never Trust a Happy Song’. Grouplove were quite a find this year, catching just the very end of their set at San Francisco’s Outside Lands summer festival, and being sufficiently enticed to pick up their album without a further listen. I’m reckless like that, sometimes. What I found was an energetic, relentlessly joyful and charming record of quite magnificent, alt-tinged pop music. Vocals are shared amongst most of the group, resulting in occasional shifts in style and delivery that keep the record fresh throughout. I got to see them live again, in full this time, and they revealed themselves to be supremely talented, and adorably cheerful. Listen to ‘Itchin’ on a Photograph’

3: Youth Lagoon - ‘The Year of Hibernation’. A late entrant as I caught it only near the end of 2011, but it’s beautiful and I’ve played it more intensely than anything else this year. It’s awash with keyboards and guitar leads, restrained drum machine, and delicate, desolate-yet-optimistic vocal in the middle-distance. Dreamy. Really lovely. Listen to ‘Seventeen’

2: PJ Harvey - ‘Let England Shake’. I remember bemusement when I first heard a live recording of ‘Let England Shake’, complete with “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” refrain; it was not endearing. But when the album arrived, the abrupt, cheery opening melody quickly slides away to expose something more integuing and broody. ‘Let England Shake’ is the most coherent album of the year, and probably of a number of years before too. Musically and thematically, it’s wonderful throughout. It stands apart from PJ Harvey’s other work too. Frustratingly, I’ve missed her touring the album, but I find it difficult to imagine it mixed in with anything else from her extensive career. The record has a high peak, ‘On Battleship Hill’, the incredible ‘England’ through to the final soaring refrain of ‘In The Dark Places’ is a really wonderful set. Listen to ‘All and Everyone’

Let England Shake, it turns out, is my favourite album of the year, because the record of the year is…

1: Mogwai - ‘Earth Division EP’. My favourite record of the year is… not an album. Mogwai did put out an album this year, and ‘Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will’ is well worth your time. Grab the Deluxe Edition, though, because it comes with an unusually special addition: A 23 minute soundtrack entitiled “Music for a Forgotten Future (The Singing Mountain)”, which was composed for an art installation by Douglas Gordon and Olaf Nicolai.

This is a different side of Mogwai from the reputation of noise and distortion that punctuates much of their work. Themeatic, carrying a delicate melody and orchestral arrangement. To call it a ‘bonus’ track is absurd. Anyway, where ‘Hardcore Will Never Die…’ is an album full of aggression, the ‘Earth Division EP’—all 15 minutes of it—is a counterpart from some place closer to ‘The Singing Mountain’. It’s made of sublime, delicate piano, acoustic instruments and simple melodies. ‘Drunk and Crazy’ is loud and electric, lest you forget this is still a Mogwai record, but in the break down it—like every piece in this short set—the piece is underpinned by a string arrangement so magnificent it defies all expectation. What’s more, ‘Hound of Winter’ is the best Mogwai vocal piece ever.

You can reach the end of ‘Earth Division’ and desperately wish it lasted longer, but at the same time, can’t argue with how perfectly formed it is. Listen to ‘Drunk and Crazy’

Updated 9th Jan, 2012: Added a fourth album of the year, Grouplove’s ‘Never Trust a Happy Song’ which I was remiss to exclude first time around. Also added some Hype Machine links to choice songs from each record.

This is why:

We’ve been building something new! Come see: fly.twitter.com #letsfly

— Twitter (@twitter) December 8, 2011

Pro tip: Download the new Twitter for iPhone or Android and unlock the new Twitter on web. fly.twitter.com

— Dave Gamache (@dhg) December 8, 2011

I would like your strongest coffee served in a mug made out of your strongest coffee.

— Brian (@Truebe) December 8, 2011

(Additionally, I urge you to view this on blog.benward.me, not just on the Tumblr Dashboard if that’s your jam.)

Exactly one year ago, I wrote a little post about Twitter’s OAuth experience, entitled Checkboxes, bitches. One thing led to another, and now I work at Twitter. So that went well.

Anyway, having been working in Twitter’s Platform Team for nine months, and taking on most of the front end work for the redesign of those very same authorization screens, I thought I’d revisit the original bullet points from that post:

• When you create an app, it should declare which permissions it actually requires to function (disabled, ticked checkbox) and which it desires by default (ticked checkbox.)
• Everything not required is optional/user definable.

We haven’t done this exactly. I still think it’s a good idea, but quite hard to retrofit in a meaningful way onto an existing API with a million registered applications, especially the user-time configuration aspect, which could result in an old app expecting to be able to do something, the user denying it, and the app failing gracelessly. I think it’s entirely reasonable that an API provider expect applications to be programmed robustly, and really anything built on a web service should be expecting failure in any case, but you do need to set that playing field, rather than redrawing the whole thing mid game. As was demonstrated by the big change we made to Direct Message access, it’s a bit of a shitter for everybody involved when you have to do that.

So no checkboxes, but big things did happen: Firstly, direct messages became a separate access scope. No-longer can all apps access DMs, even when all they needed to do was hook you up with the people you follow. Alongside that though, there’s now the ability for an application to upgrade tokens: So, once upon a time if you authorized your app with a Read token, you were stuck with that forever, or until the user explicitly revoked your app. What is now the case is that you can pass an x_auth_access_type param when generating a request token, and use that to upgrade a user’s access type to your app on subsequent authorizations. So, you can make an app, request read-only access initially, and then ask the user to add read-write access at a later time, when they try to perform an action that requires write access.

It’s not user control over granularity, it’s application control over granularity. Not the same, but not bad. And we have plenty of anecdotal evidence that it’s in apps best interests to do this, as users are more likely auth apps that don’t ask for write permission. I’m hoping to get actual numbers to back that one up at some point.

• Permission to post a tweet is separate from other, private profile writing operations, since it’s so socially destructive.

We changed DMs, and did it in such a way that we had to change all the permissions that existing applications had. That was annoying, but necessary to ensure that user’s opted in to granting sensitive DM access. Adding other levels of granularity though—such as this one for posting access—wouldn’t require the same kind of reset though, and existing apps could be opted into it by default. I’d definitely like to make this happen at some point, especially now that Web Intents are proving so popular with app makers who only need a simple way to post a Tweet, rather than having to create their own mimicked UI.

• I think this also makes the permissions/capabilities copy clearer. Bonus.

I’m still really, really happy with the redesign. We revised the language a couple of times, to the point where I no-longer receive comments about it coming on too strong, so I hope we’ve struck a good balance, and users are now more aware of what’s what.

It’s fair to say that really we built something quite different to my little post, but a lot of the principals are in there. I’m pleased with the progress.

Annual Ben Party is coming up. This year—at no 2am, no less—I wrote two possible invitation texts. This is the one we didn’t go with.

The enhanced grip of white gloves grasped precariously on a shattered floorboard where some stairs had been moments ago. In slow motion, a nitroglycerin explosion tore through the east wing of the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay’s home. It was the daily signal for “lunch time.”

Jeeves—which wasn’t a real name, but the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay couldn’t remember anything less trite—gingerly climbed down the remnants of the stairwell and stalked toward the kitchen. Today, the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay had a guest for lunch, a regular occurrence that required some care in preparation. Even more care than cooking with petroleum usually entails.

The guest, obviously, required regular nutrition, and a lack of poison in their food, whereas the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay demands steak fried blue in gasoline. The Motion Picture Director Michael Bay would brag to his guest that they were eating the same obscene creation. Jeeves would just serve them both regular food but for the fact the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay could taste the difference, and liked it.

The fate of his predecessor (also called Jeeves) was a consequence of testing this theory. With his dying breath, Jeeves Previous was only able to mutter “What the fuck? What the fuck is your stomach made from? Engine parts?” This was just before he was catapulted into a lake. Which subsequently exploded. As did the catapult.

One thing Jeeves had learned in his years of service was this: Never, ever, ever invite the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay to house parties. His insurers won’t cover it any more, and he always comes home upset that the women he met were regularly clothed. With this policy in mind, Jeeves moved an envelope from the table to the trash, ensuring that the Motion Picture Director Michael Bay never received his invitation to THE THIRD ANNUAL BEN PARTY, and as a result, nothing there will catch fire.

I’ve been playing quite a lot of LA Noire lately. I’m enjoying it immensely. The story line, arcs, and episodic case structure are all remarkable good, and it’s a very playable game. (Inconsequential or very mild spoilers may follow.)

There’s a huge amount to enjoy about LA Noire. As Charlie Brooker said recently, it’s ‘the triumphant return of the adventure game’. I like the setting, there’s plenty to explore in the glamourous, indulgent sleaze of post-war Los Angeles. The story is also very good. Having completed my homicide assignment and now transferred into the vice squad, I’m about half-way in. The slowly unravelling corruption going on around Cole Phelps (your character in the game) is growing in intrigue, and the war flashback cut scenes to his backstory are also quite interesting.

Here’s the thing, though. The very fact that the player’s character has a backstory is a problem. There’s a dark past to be uncovered, and he has an unbalanced temperament (enhanced by the game’s lack of predictability when doubting a witness during interviews and interrogation, and also his apparent habit of aggressively pushing pedestrians to the ground if you accidentally walk into them.) Whilst he’s generally more restrained and patient than any of the colleagues you’re partnered with, he is also a man of 1947 this plays out in his dialogue and treatment of other characters (both in social and police professional attitudes.)

As the player, I keep finding myself at odds with this pattern. When my partner punches a witness, I’m personally unhappy at his methods, but Cole Phelps just gapes on. My attitudes as the player don’t map to the game, so I’m watching the game play out rather than leading it.

I’m Sam Tyler, helpless on a sofa.

What’s really going on is that the game has transported me, a cosmopolitan, conscientious, and socially aware individual of the twenty-first century, into a time of backwards attitudes, malpractice, inappropriate police behaviour, and classic automobiles. In every one of those respects, I find it remarkably analogous to the magnificent BBC police drama ‘Life on Mars’. You should watch it, it’s only two series (sixteen episodes) and I almost applauded the ending in my own living room.

Modern day police officer Sam Tyler is hit by a car in 2006 and wakes up in 1973, memories and attitudes intact, and still a police officer in the equivalent Manchester department. The story is partly the exposition and mystery around what exactly is going on with his apparent time travel scenario, but also how this modern, proper man handles working in a police force of corruption, sexism, and racism, carrying guns and a blasé attitude toward assaulting their suspects. Sam Tyler is constantly at odds with the behaviour of his peers, just as I am with pretty much everyone in LA Noire. The difference being not just that I can’t intervene, but that the actions of my own character are from this alien time as well. I’m just sat here, watching in mild horror as my avatar clumsily and inexplicably aggressively accuses a grieving husband of murdering his wife, when all I really wanted was to gently prod him on the coincidence of muddy boots and a conspicuously absent piece of rope.

It’s a separation of player and actor that shapes a different kind of enjoyment from the game than might have been. It’s like watching a TV show more than playing a game. In each case there’s a big title, exposition of the larger arc, there’s some left-field backstory build up. Each successful investigation leaves me satisfied like watching a good weekly episode. Of course there’s extra enjoyment when you make the whole thing more efficient by piecing together some more obscure clues, but it’s still just repetition of a good formula.

It’s a third person perspective adventure game that starkly leaves you feeling the third person looking in. The game is good because the story it’s telling is well written, the characters are well acted, and it’s enjoyable to ‘watch’. But the more I play it, the more I think it would be an awful lot more engrossing to play myself in a ‘Life on Mars’ game instead.

Trailing whitespace is nasty, and there are various ways to go about catching it. There’s a neat way of running TextMate’s ‘strip trailing whitespace’ macro every time you save, for example, but that introduces an irritating lag if you’re twitchy with ⌘S like I am.

So instead, you can edit the language definitions for the languages you use:

{
  name = 'invalid.whitespace';
  match = '\s+$';
}

Then, open TextMate preferences, and under Fonts & Colours add a new colour named “Trailing Whitespace” and enter ‘invalid.whitespace’ as the scope selector. Make it red, or grey, or whatever you like, and stray whitespace will now be highlighted.

Internationalising phrases is harder than it looks, since it’s not just an exercise in swapping words and inserting variables. A common issue is the plural: The presence of an ‘s’ on a key word, based on the value of a piece of data you’re describing.

I’ve been looking for more complicated examples, though. Various foreign languages will change phrase in more complex ways as numbers increase, and a good translation system needs to be able to handle this range-based substitution.

I just stumbled on a still-simple three-phrase translation in English (in a Last.FM tooltip), so am noting it down whilst I remember it. I need to spend some time collecting better examples though; suggestions and other references are very welcome.

‘You’ve played this song n times’

• You’ve played this song 1 times
• You’ve played this song 2 times
• You’ve played this song 3 times
• You’ve played this song 4 times

‘1 times’ will render without the ‘s’, but is also clumsy. The better phrase would be ‘You’ve played this song once.’ First dedicated translation variant.

‘2 times’ adds the common ‘s’ plural, but is still an inelegant phrase. So, that should be ‘You’ve played this song twice.’ Second dedicated variant.

Now, unless our site is recording the number of times you’ve worn a top hat and monocle, it’s unlikely to use the word ‘thrice’. So ‘3 times’ is the first instance of a generic, swappable phrase that will scale up with all remaining numbers in English.

Of course there’s the zero-case too; ‘0 times’ works, but ‘You’ve not played this song’ is better.

Generally when writing views, we find it tolerable to do a data.count === 1 check when needed. But here you need three branches in English. A different language, however, with different plural rules, might not. Or might employ a colloquial phrasing at 10, or 5. Plurals need to be handled within the translation function itself.

Update: 2011-04-10: If reading this made you think, then you should probably now read Localizing Your Perl Programs by Sean M. Burke and Jordan Lachler, which documents specific scenarios around Russian, Chinese and Arabic and English. It was written in 1999, and documents the limitations of gettext(), which is still the base of most web software translations I’ve ever worked with. They explain how maketext works in comparison. That came in via Paul Mison.