Peter Marklund's Home

We needed to internationalize the user interface of a Rails application that we are building and looked at a plethora of alternatives, such as Globalize, Globalite and the localization plugin by DHH. Finally we settled for the Gibberish plugin. Gibberish uses an unusual hybrid approach with both inline english texts in the code and keys for message lookups. A typical Gibberish lookup looks like this:

    update_show_page("The course has been booked"[:bookings_book_confirm])

To complement the Gibberish plugin I've drafted the gibberish_translate plugin that adds a script for extracting all message lookups from a Rails app and a controller with a web UI for doing translations. The plugin also keeps track of which english texts a translation was made from so that you can flag when english texts are changed. The plugin avoids using the database and works directly against the YAML message files in the lang directory.