What is Pluralization?
Pluralization is choosing the right form of a message based on a count. English has two forms, "1 file" and "2 files", so developers are tempted to hack it with an if statement. Other languages break that hack immediately: some use one form for everything, while others, Russian and Arabic among them, have several forms selected by rules more complex than "equal to one".
The CLDR project defines standard plural categories per language: zero, one, two, few, many, and other. A proper i18n layer lets the translation itself declare which forms it needs, and picks the right one at runtime from the count and the active locale.
Laravel handles this with trans_choice() and a pipe syntax in the translation string, including exact-count and range segments. For more complex grammar, ICU MessageFormat plurals via the intl extension are the heavier-duty option. Note that ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd) follow separate rules from cardinal counts.
// lang/en/messages.php
return [
'apples' => '{0} No apples|{1} One apple|[2,*] :count apples',
];
trans_choice('messages.apples', 0); // "No apples"
trans_choice('messages.apples', 7, ['count' => 7]); // "7 apples"