This recipe shows something that's a bit more complex than the previous two, as we want the shortcode output to be a combination of static text with a dynamic element, and we want that element to appear in different places based on the grammatical structure of the target language. The way to achieve this functionality is to combine the __ internationalization function with the sprintf standard PHP function.

The purpose of the sprintf function is to insert a variable in a string. It performs this task by looking for a placeholder in the target string sent in the first argument, and replaces it with the variable that it receives as its second argument. Some examples of placeholders are %s for a string and %d for an integer. With this functionality in mind, we use a placeholder as part of the string to be translated so that users who create localization files can choose where the value will be placed as part of the sentence structure. Once the translation has been obtained by the __ function, we can immediately send the alternate language string to sprintf to create the final text.