Forum: Rails I18n question about conventions of using I18n.

Hi everyone,

I'm a bit curious on what the conventions of internationalizing a
project is...

1)  So let's say you want to internationalize some html email text...
And there's something like this:

Thanks,
<br />
Yo Momma.

...

Would it be better to do:

<%= t('footer.thanks') %>
<br />
<%= t('footer.signature') %>

footer:
  thanks:
    Thanks,
  signature:
    Yo Momma.

or something like:

<%= raw t('footer.closing') %>

footer:
  closing:
    Thanks,
    <br />
    Yo Momma.

?

-patrick

For large chunks of text I'd generally prefer the single key as it makes 
it easier for a translator to see the full context of the mail. In 
general you should avoid concatenating translations together as it's 
easy to run into situations where it just won't work. I think written 
Chinese goes top to bottom, right to left so if that is the same in 
email then your template that puts the signature at the bottom could 
never be translated correctly. (I have no idea if that's actually the 
case for Chinese but does demonstrate what could go wrong.)

As developers it's easy to think "I could DRY this up with one key for 
the signature used everywhere" but it doesn't always make sense when 
translated.

HTH,

Chris

Agreed. If possible, you could use something like Markdown so the 
translator gets something closer to plain text. Though <br> specifically 
is a bit of a mess with standard Markdown.

Sent from my iPad

Turns out *I* can't read, Chinese is top to bottom. In my defence it's
late on Friday and my brain isn't going full speed :) My point about
being careful about concatenation still stands though!

Chris

well, now that thinking about this, it probably makes more sense to
do:

footer:
  closing:
    - Thanks,
    - Yo Momma.

# email.html.erb
<%= t('footer.closing').join("<br />") %>

% email.text.plain
<%= t('footer.closing').join("\r\n") %>