New version of biber+biblatex problem with pagetotal string

Question

after biblatex was updated to 3.8 and biber to 2.8 I have problem with pagetotal string translation to polish in bibliography. MWE (compiled with xelatex):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{filecontents}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setdefaultlanguage{polish}

\begin{filecontents*}{\jobname.bib}
@book{mybook,
  author  = {Some, Author},
  title   = {Some title},
  date    = {2017},
  pagetotal   = {150}
}
\end{filecontents*}

\usepackage[backend=biber,citestyle=verbose-trad1]{biblatex}
\addbibresource{\jobname.bib}

\begin{document}
Hello \cite{mybook}.
\end{document}

now with updated biber and biblatex it produces incorrect pagetotal string:

while old biber and biblatex produced good one:

The same applies to lithuanian language, and perhaps other languages/fields. Also the same result is when using babel + pdflatex.

Is it a bug? What is a workaround for this?

Answer 1

Following discussions in https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/534 \mkpagetotal was changed to use dedicated pagetotal bibstrings. In older versions \mkpagetotal used the normal page bibstrings that were ungrammatical in some (mainly Scandinavian) languages. The Polish language file has not been updated with the appropriate translations for pagetotal etc. You could define them directly in the document with

\DefineBibliographyStrings{polish}{%
  pagetotal  = {s\adddot},
  pagetotals = {s\adddot},
}

If you would like to share the correct strings for Polish with the developers that would be appreciated.

Additionally, there was a bug relating to pagetotal in biblatex 3.8a that is fixed in version 3.9. See https://github.com/plk/biblatex/issues/653