A few more thoughts on handling I18n for real projects.

Images

The way I handled images was pretty simple. Just added this application_helper:

  # Translated image tag
  def timage_tag(source, options = {})
    image_tag("#{I18n.locale}/#{source}", options)
  end

Then I created a directory in public/images for each of the supported locales (e.g. public/images/en-US), put all the images with text in there and I was good to go.

Pagination

Pagination was handled similarly with a helper to wrap the call to mislav’s will_paginate gem:

  # Translated will_paginate
  def twill_paginate(collection = nil, options = {})
    will_paginate collection, {:previous_label => t('constants.will_paginate.previous'), :next_label => t('constants.will_paginate.next')}.merge(options)
  end

# config/locales/en-US.yml
en-US:
  constants:
    will_paginate:
      previous: "« Previous"
      next: "Next »"

activerecord

Oh and another thing that really helped was using the human_name stuff built in to activerecord. So, for example, everywhere I found an “Agent” in the text instead of an explicit call to translate I could just do Agent.human_name. And for each of Agent’s attributes I could do Agent.human_attribute_name(’name’). And that even works when it’s not a real attribute, but just one of Agent’s public methods (or anything else for that matter). Plus it’ll work for your form labels too, once you install the i18n label plugin. (One caveat though: label User, :username won’t work. It has to be a form_for(@user) do |f| and then your f.label :username will show the human_attribute_name).

#config/locales/en-US.yml
en-US:
  activerecord:
    models:
      agent: "Agent"
    attributes:
      agent:
        name: "Name"
        some_calculated_value: "Some Calculated Value"

This entry was posted on Friday, December 12th, 2008 at 10:36 am and is filed under Ruby on Rails.