Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen <at> gmail.com> writes:
The plural construct is used when it is not clear how many items will be available. Consequently there is not much to be done about it. Also the effect of plural is not the same for every languages. Welsh allows for six ways of indicating a multitude.
Some of them may be rephrased, and some localizations do not really need them at all. Foe example, in Hungarian "<number> <noun>" constructs the noun is always in singular, so we've been using "{{PLURAL:$1|one|$1}} thingy" because the automated checks complain if they see no PLURAL, but on hu.wikipedia it could be replaced with "$1 thingy" without trouble. (I'm not sure there are actually frequently loading messages which have PLURAL, but it's worth checking.)