The Unicode CLDR has a whole database of formatted strings for each locale, for more or less the reason you describe. Formatting dates or big numbers (12345 -> 12.3k) is impossible to achieve without a generic formatting language.

Pluralization is another nightmare of its own. Look into how Russian and similar languages pluralize. It has to do with the value of the number modulo 10, similar to English ordinals.

CLDR: http://cldr.unicode.org/