I am localizing an app with the default rails I18n with globalize3 as the back-end.
Is it possible to set a locale with a country code (ie :fr-CA) to fallback to its specific language (:fr) before going to the default fallback automatically? I know its possible to set each locale/country manually with
config.i18n.fallbacks = {'fr-CA' => 'fr'}
But it would be nice to not have to add each fallback manually and have this behaviour automatic.
To achieve precisely this I have an initializer with
I18n::Backend::Simple.send(:include, I18n::Backend::Fallbacks)
See the source code for more info.
Edit:
This reminds me, there is an annoying bug in the ActionView LookupContext which prevents this from working for localized views (though it works correcly for locale files). I see it still hasn't been fixed. Basically, if you have any localized views (help pages for example, which are unsuitable to store in locale files due to their length) then a fr-CA locale will not fall back to a view called help.fr.html.erb. You either have to name the file help.fr-CA.html.erb or, which is what I have done, monkeypatch the LookupContext with another initializer, sort of like this:
module ActionView
class LookupContext
# Override locale= to also set the I18n.locale. If the current I18n.config object responds
# to original_config, it means that it's has a copy of the original I18n configuration and it's
# acting as proxy, which we need to skip.
def locale=(value)
if value
config = I18n.config.respond_to?(:original_config) ? I18n.config.original_config : I18n.config
config.locale = value[0,2] # only use first part of the locale in lookups
end
super(#skip_default_locale ? I18n.locale : default_locale)
end
end
end
Another edit: Note that the patch is rather crude and breaks full locale lookups, going straight for just the language. If you need to also have fully matching views (language-REGION) you'll need to improve my code!
Related
I work on Rails 5.2.3 and Ruby 2.5.1. At some point, I found an issue when I expected my array-of-string constant to contain some string but it didn't. Turned out the problem was related to German Umlaute characters (öäü).
So I have the constant defined like the following:
# coding: utf-8
# frozen_string_literal: true
class MyClass
module MyModule
MY_CONSTANT = [
'Breite in mm',
'Höhe in mm',
'Länge in mm'
].map(&:parameterize).freeze
end
end
I expect the constant to look like ["breite-in-mm", "hoehe-in-mm", "laenge-in-mm"]
But instead it's stored as ["breite-in-mm", "hohe-in-mm", "lange-in-mm"]. You see, "ö" has been converted to "o" instead of "oe". Same for "ä". Now it's "a", not "ae".
It works this way on production, in RSpec tests and even when I start Rails console and call this constant. But when I define a new constant from Rails console using the very same code, the strings are being successfully converted to what I expect, i.e. ["breite-in-mm", "hoehe-in-mm", "laenge-in-mm"]
I could easily get rid of this parameterize method and just type in the strings as I need them. Maybe I will have to do that. But I'm really curious about why all this is happening and couldn't find an answer by myself.
So thank you in advance for any ideas.
The parameterize method in Rails (through its use of ActiveSupport::Inflector#transliterate) is in locale aware. It thus uses locale-depending rules to transliterate characters such as Umlauts to ASCII characters.
When your app handles a request (or at least once after booting), you are usually setting a I18n locale, e.g. with I18n.locale = :de for a single request or with I18n.default_locale = :de for your whole app. After that, Rails (resp. the i18n gem) used this locale by default for its transliteration rules.
When initially setting your constant, this default locale was likely not yet set. The i18n gem is thus not aware of the German transliteration rules and uses only the basic Unicode normalization rules.
As a workaround, you can either pass the desired locale to use to the parameterize method as
MY_CONSTANT = [
'Breite in mm',
'Höhe in mm',
'Länge in mm'
].map { |const| const.parameterize(locale: :de).freeze }.freeze
or you can alternatively set the default i18n locale earlier than when your code is executed (e.g. in a file in config/initializers, depending on where exactly you initialize your constant):
I18n.default_locale = :de
Thanks, Holger Just for your great answer. It seems to be correct except it only works for Rails 6.0.0. So I'm going to post the one for Rails 5.2.3 which I'm using on my project.
Unfortunately in Rails 5 parameterize method does not accept the locale argument yet. This will be possible only in Rails 6.
But still, as mentioned in Holger Just's answer, parameterize method relies on transliterate method which does actually use current locale and converts strings according to it.
See Rails 5.2.3 docs and sources for those methods:
https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.3/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector.html#method-i-parameterize
https://api.rubyonrails.org/v5.2.3/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector.html#method-i-transliterate
So I cannot pass the locale to parameterize method directly. Then I should set the locale before my constant is defined.
Setting I18n.default_locale = :de inside application.rb file did not help. I already had that and the strings have been transliterated regardless.
What eventually helped was setting I18n.locale = :de manually. Thanks to this, I got my strings parameterized correctly without any changes to MyConstant definition.
Hope somebody can point me at the right direction with this...
Basically, i have the locales setup and it works fine. However, i need to depending on how the user gets to the site (example_company.com, example_company.cz or example_company.de..) have slightly different content(views and layout).
I've managed to boil it down to a constant or env variable that if i was to run multiple instances of the site(1 for each country), i could set on the server so that i get the behaviour i need with 1 code base.
My question is, how are people dealing with this in general? is there any way i can serve all countries on the same instance and set some flag based on .com or .cz or whatever, that dictates which 'version' they get without effecting the url itself?
I already have the locales in the url and would prefer not to mix the two as i will have to support multiple languages for each version. For example, french and czech would still support english.. But if i go to the french one, i will only show 2 locales (french and english)...
Hope i managed to explain properly.. if not let me know and i will try again.
If you use Rails' built-in i18n support, you can easily select locales by TLD.
From the official Rails i18n guide:
One option you have is to set the locale from the domain name where your application runs. For example, we want www.example.com to load the English (or default) locale, and www.example.es to load the Spanish locale. Thus the top-level domain name is used for locale setting. This has several advantages:
The locale is an obvious part of the URL.
People intuitively grasp in which language the content will be displayed.
It is very trivial to implement in Rails.
Search engines seem to like that content in different languages lives at different, inter-linked domains.
You can implement it like this in your ApplicationController:
before_action :set_locale
def set_locale
I18n.locale = extract_locale_from_tld || I18n.default_locale
end
# Get locale from top-level domain or return nil if such locale is not available
# You have to put something like:
# 127.0.0.1 application.com
# 127.0.0.1 application.it
# 127.0.0.1 application.pl
# in your /etc/hosts file to try this out locally
def extract_locale_from_tld
parsed_locale = request.host.split('.').last
I18n.available_locales.map(&:to_s).include?(parsed_locale) ? parsed_locale : nil
end
Be sure to read the i18n guide in full. It covers how to use the built-in i18n support. A big advantage is you don't need separate views for each locale.
I have internationalized and localized my application using the standard rails mechanisms.
Everything is stored in en, fr, de.yml files.
My application is multi-tenant, based on the subdomain.
I would like to allow my users to override certain translations in the application (e.g. to change "Employee" to "Associate" because it matches their own terminology).
I've tried to change the load path of my yml files on a per-request basis, but to no avail.
Any idea how I could, for each request, look up first in my user-specific yaml file, and fall back to the default yaml file if the translation was not overriden?
Assuming you store the subdomain in an instance variable from a controller filter, you could override the translation helper to do a lookup with a subdomain-specific scope first, then fallback to the specified or default scope. Something like this:
module ApplicationHelper
def t(key, original_options = {})
options = original_options.dup
site_translation_scope = ['subdomain_overrides', #subdomain.name]
scope =
case options[:scope]
when nil
site_translation_scope
when Array
options[:scope] = site_translation_scope + options[:scope]
when String
[site_translation_scope, options[:scope]].join(".")
end
translate(key, options.merge(:scope => scope, :raise => true))
rescue I18n::MissingTranslationData
translate(key, original_options)
end
end
Then you add your subdomain-specific overrides likes this:
en:
customer: Customer
subdomain_overrides:
subdomain_1:
customer: Buyer
If you want to allow tenants to use specific language but fallback to the default, I have written a micro library that will get the job done:
https://github.com/ElMassimo/i18n_multitenant
It takes care of configuring I18n to fallback to the base locale, allowing you to use tenant-specific translations if available. It's designed to work with the default backend of static .yml files, but it should also work with other I18n backends.
I've recently created I18n_global_scope gem that does exactly what you are describing, please checkout the source code https://github.com/mobilityhouse/i18n_global_scope and let me know your feedback.
I am new to ruby & rails and have started building an application.
My goal is to build this in a way I can easily translate the contents of the rails app and display the website contents in a locale preferred by registered user.
Appreciate any inputs on some of the best practices or references to any documentation to read, to build a web application that can be easily translated?
Thanks,
Krish.
Check out the Rails Internationalization (I18n) API. It does everything you've described.
Also check out Globalize3, it became a standard for model translations. Very useful.
You can use ready_for_i18n plugin that convert your erb to desired form.It saves some time.
You'd definetely watch this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTu4iHWGDyE
Here are some tips or best practices I noted while working through Internationalization of a Rails app. (It's possible that some of them are now outdated).
Before I get into a list here's some clarification between localization and translation that was helpful to me:
Definitions:
App localization and model translations are separate concerns. Figure out which one of those (or both) it is, that you need.
The way I use them here:
App localization: Localization your app to a locale.
Model translation: Translation your model/data into a language.
Example: Give me the french translation (model translation) of the resource in my Spanish site (app localization)
I use Globalize for model translations.
Helpful Tips/ Best Practices:
Some of the following are clearly just helpful tips while working in the Context of Rails + Globalize, some of them might be more than that... possibly best practices.
I18n.locale refers to and sets the locale of the app. When using Globalize, Globalize.locale refers to and sets the locale for model/data translations.
Set both I18n.locale and Globalize.locale on every request. Since these variables are set in Thread, it will avoid some hard-to-replicate bugs.
Set Globalize.locale to I18n.locale right after setting I18n.locale. This allows for model translations to default to the locale of the app. (On my Spanish site, I expect data to be in Spanish, by default).
Change Globalize.locale (and notI18n.locale) to change model translation.
Reset I18n.locale and Globalize.locale after every test. In rspec
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.after(:each) do
I18n.locale = :en
Globalize.locale = :en
end
end
Either use subdomain, or subfolder in the url to refer to the locale of the app.
Use a language parameter to specify the language of the data.
When you work on your rails app, you will probably use default_url_options to use I18n.locale as the default locale parameter for your route / path helpers. However this doesn't work in tests. I picked up a solution from this github issue on rspec-rails.
I monkey patch ActionDispatch::Routing::RouteSet like so:
class ActionDispatch::Routing::RouteSet
def url_for_with_locale_fix(options={})
url_for_without_locale_fix(options.merge(:locale => I18n.locale))
end
alias_method_chain :url_for, :locale_fix
end
Set up a translate helper t as a wrapper around the I18n.t method
module I18nHelper
def t string, options = {}
I18n.t string, options
end
end
RSpec.configure do |config|
config.include I18nHelper
end
This is mini-pattern I use. You can check it out: http://developers-note.blogspot.com/2012/01/rails-i18n-good-practice.html
I18n fallback is loaded:
I18n::Backend::Simple.send(:include, I18n::Backend::Fallbacks)
Any idea now to temporary disable it? I have forms, where I want to edit various language versions, and with fallback I am getting fields with default language, if given translation is yet not present.
You can pass the fallback: true option to I18n.t, which will prevent I18n from looking up other locales (see implementation here). But it's probably not part of the public API...
You can pass :fallback => 'false' on your I18n.translate calls, but this is not part of the public API.
Another way you might want to try is the following:
I18n.available_locales.each do
|al| I18n.fallbacks.merge!({al => [al]})
end
This will basically make the fallback for each available locale to include only itself. So, if the translation is not found in itself, then there is not fallback to fall back to.
However, then you need to find a way to restore to the default fallback.
You can do that for example with a statement like:
I18n.available_locales.each do
|al| I18n.fallbacks.merge!({al => [al, I18n.default_locale]})
end
if anyone is still wondering how to do that, you can change the I18n.fallbacks on the fly:
def foo
I18n.fallbacks[:at] = [:at]
# do stuff with I18n#t
ensure
I18n.fallbacks[:at] = [:at, :de] # or whatever is was before
end
Not sure how safe is that though.
Are you using globalize?
I'm using I18n fallback for my system strings, and globalize3 for my attribute translations. I want system strings to fallback, but not attributes. I simply disabled fallbacks for globalize only with a small monkey patch:
config/initializers/i18n.rb:
require "i18n/backend/fallbacks"
I18n::Backend::Simple.send(:include, I18n::Backend::Fallbacks)
# monkey patch globalize3 to not use fallbacks
module Globalize
def self.fallbacks?
false
end
end