For English and German, it's easy, 1: singular, everything else: plural. For other languages, there are sometimes multiple plural forms, e.g. in Russian, we have 1: singular; 2-5, 21-25, 31-35, etc.: plural1; 6-20, 26-30, etc.: plural2.
We should probably use the gettext library or similar for this, they already implement that. They're also a superset of our current translation system, so the transition should be somewhat easy.