Any website that needs to deal with international customers will naturally have to support multiple languages. In this regard, Java has pretty good support for this and there are a plethora of online resources that show you how. The trouble is that there are almost no non-noddy examples for pluralizations. Pluralizations are simple in English but a nightmare in languages like Polish and Russian where the multiple suffix is almost random!

Thankfully one of my co-workers Stuart came across the excellent if little known ChoiceFormat class that provides much of the functionality you need. Being a good lad he wrote a blog post about it and in a nice show of karma, he was given an even better library to use. Supported by IBM, the ICU4J library is used by almost everyone including IBM themselves, Google and Rolls-Royce and offers all the features you need for an internationalization library.