Ruby Forum Ruby on Rails > Re: no one cares about i18n (was [OT]: Asking questions on t

Do most others in the community agree with this statement?  It seems to 
me
that i18n is:

1.  Actually important to many people
2.  Not really the difficult to implement in concept
3.  Something that people like to point out about Rails to say it's not
ready foir "Enterprise"

It seems to be that a big part of Rails is encouraging people to do 
things
the "Right Way", yet none of the Rails books/articles I have read 
(AWDwR,
Rails Recipes, etc.) even discuss how to do i18n, let alone encourage 
it.
Why?

In my opinion Globalize has this covered, at least until m17n support
rolls out with Ruby 2.0.
http://www.globalize-rails.org/wiki/

On 5/2/06, Paul Barry <mail@paulbarry.com> wrote:
> Rails Recipes, etc.) even discuss how to do i18n, let alone encourage it.
> Why?

My point was that compared to the number of people who read this list,
its a relatively small number who actually know enough about i18n with
Rails to answer his questions faster than he answered them himself.

I agree with what you're saying here.

-- James

In http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsLocalization someone did 
ask *the* question again: What is the current best solution for I18N?

I did add these links to that very same page:

Gloablize (http://wiki.globalize-rails.org/wiki/)
Localize 
(http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/localization/README)
GLoc (http://rubyforge.org/projects/gloc/)
Multilingual 
(https://opensvn.csie.org/traccgi/multi_lingual_rails/trac.cgi/)

A very brief feature comparision for the first three plugins is listed 
here: http://www.agilewebdevelopment.com/plugins/category/8

And then there's the old important thread from end of last year ("Rails 
core going multiligual...ever?"): http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/184

BTW - Where's the place to DRY up all this information and keep it up to 
date?

Hi,

i18n means:
(1) Message Catalogs (Translate strings)
(2) Formatting Date, Time, Currency and others.
(3) String handling

Now, I mention (1) because this discussion about (1).

IMO, the most important things for (1) are:
(a) Maintenance-ability
    * Extract strings from .rb/rhtml/ActiveRecord to a file 
automatically.
    * Merge the old(translated) file and new one easily.
(b) Multi-textdomains
    * Rails, Rails application, Plugins, Other libraries
      should have their own message catalogs.
(c) Plural/Singler messages
(d) Auto finding client locale correctly
(e) Translate Rails messages

Now, Ruby-GetText-Package has already supported all of important these
features.
I checked other localized libraries/plugins, but they haven't have
enough features yet.

And it's already supported 11 languages for Rails.
http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-screenshot.html
# Of course, usually I welcome other language translators.

So, I highly recommand to try Ruby-GetText-Package once.

There is a tutorial for Ruby on Rails and Ruby-GetText-Package.
http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-howto-rails.html

HTH,


On Tue, 2 May 2006 17:15:51 -0400

I'd be most grateful if you wiki'd this.  As well, it may be
appropriate to set up a list specifically for these issues since many
on this list don't care/need these features.  i'd be happy to join.  i
for one drown in traffic from this list and probably miss half the
mail i should read despite browsing it regularly.

pt.

On 5/11/06, Martin Bernd Schmeil <bschmeil@autoscout24.com> wrote:
> (https://opensvn.csie.org/traccgi/multi_lingual_rails/trac.cgi/)
>
>
>
>
> --
> Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.
> _______________________________________________
> Rails mailing list
> Rails@lists.rubyonrails.org
> http://lists.rubyonrails.org/mailman/listinfo/rails
>


--
Parker Thompson
http://www.parkert.com/
510.541.0125

Thanks for the answers. Since I have to make a decision either for a 
plugin or as someone (more experienced in this field) recommended to 
re-invent the wheel using a gettext approach, I'll do some evaluation 
and put the results somewhere.

Since my time is limited (we need a decision ASAP) I'll probably just 
scratch the evaluation of the option. Anyways, I hope we can start a 
discussion and a separate forum / mailing list is a good idea (at least 
for us 5.7 billion non US Rails people ;-) ).

Two things:

I asked Andreas, the Forum (Email Gateway) Maintainer to create a 
Mailing List / Forum (no answer yet)

I created a Rails Wiki page: 
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/InternationalizationComparision

Don't know how far I can contribute, one of our requirements is to use 
Oracle, so Globalize (and maybe all other plugins) may not do it for us.

I am also very interested in localization,

This goes for database content, rhtml-content (including names of 
columns of tables), mail-content etc. All that is shown to the user.

In my experience table names, and table column names in the database are 
best done in english. In the nearly 20 years I have been involved with 
developing database solutions I have never had a database with swedish 
names of tables and fields.

This is also because it you some day want to distribute your solution 
abroad, you wouldn´t want the names to be in Swedish anyway.

When Rails uses "column.human_name", I would like to be able to choose 
another language (Swedish). Now I get the database english names. To me 
'human_name' is not what the database columns are called, they are 
rarely human name at all, since different customers of ours call the 
same object by different names in their context. To us developers it is 
the same, but not to the cusomers.

So a feature with Meta-names of the columns would be a nice feature. 
(Crystal Reports Server that we use for reporting has this: a layer of 
Meta names (human names) that are used in customer interaction, but the 
database names are something else.

SO I would like a clean separation of what is shown in the view, from 
what things are called in the model.

Per-Olof Hermansson

PS I am new to RoR, Just been reading up till now, and just started to 
do some experimentary solutions on my desktop,

Hi,

On Fri, 12 May 2006 12:05:21 +0200
Per-Olof Hermansson <per-olof.hermansson@massmarketing.se> wrote:

> This is also because it you some day want to distribute your solution 
> (Crystal Reports Server that we use for reporting has this: a layer of 
> Meta names (human names) that are used in customer interaction, but the 
> database names are something else.
> 
> SO I would like a clean separation of what is shown in the view, from 
> what things are called in the model.

Already Ruby-GetText-Package supports ActiveRecord translation.
(It overrides column.human_name as you think.)
The table/column names are extracted as the target messages.
And they are translated correctly .... you don't need to touch your
models by hand.

As you say, sometimes the table/column names are not human readable.
Ruby-GetText-Package can use for English people to
translate table/column names to human readable name.

Anyway, I recommand you try Ruby-GetText-Package once.

Installation:
http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext.html#Install
HOWTO for Ruby on Rails:
http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-howto-rails.html

HTH,

Masao Mutoh wrote:
>
> Anyway, I recommand you try Ruby-GetText-Package once.
> 
> Installation:
> http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext.html#Install
> HOWTO for Ruby on Rails:
> http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-howto-rails.html
> 
> HTH,

Thanks, I´ll have a look,

Per-Olof

Hi all,

please have a look at this posting in the new rails internationalization 
mailing list

http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/65659

Guys, I've been struggling with a similar, but simpler problem. I just
want to be able to CRUD Swedish characters in Oracle 10g tables.

I know I've got the Oracle end set up properly since I can enter,
retrieve and display
these characters from isqlplus, but when I use a RoR generated web
form I get "?" stored in my tables.

If you've work out how to do this, I'd be very grateful if you would
tell me how you did this.

Before I'd found this tread, I posted a few times and got some good
input back, but nothing got me quite to where I need to be.

Bealach

Please look at this page und the references on it (especially the I18n 
mailing list / forum): 
http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/InternationalizationComparison

Your problem may or may not be related to either setting the

- http header to the correct mime type / encoding
- having a wrong oracle server or client setting

What do you guys think of 99translations.com?

It seems like a big step towards better translation management.

Paul Barry wrote:
> Do most others in the community agree with this statement?  It seems to 
> me
> that i18n is:
> 
> 1.  Actually important to many people
> 2.  Not really the difficult to implement in concept

Actually it is a bit painful to implement, as it means removing all the 
text from views and putting it?... well I don't really know.

The yaml files are okay for short sentences, but how do you handle 
localizing big chunks of html? I don't feel it fits nicely in the yaml 
files. You lose the syntax highlighting.

How do you do that?

Fernando Perez wrote:
[...]
> Actually it is a bit painful to implement, as it means removing all the 
> text from views and putting it?... well I don't really know.

This is why I use gettext (or faster_gettext): the phrases themselves 
*are* the keys, so the views look like

_('Welcome to the site, %{user}!') % {:user => user}

rather than

get_message(:site_welcome_message, user)

This way, the view files stay legible, and the application is usable 
even if no locale is set.  The translations go in .po files, which are 
an industry standard, and so translators and CAT software can be 
expected to know what to do with them.

> 
> The yaml files are okay for short sentences, but how do you handle 
> localizing big chunks of html? 
[...]

PO files are meant to deal with arbitrarily long strings of text. 
Again, the gettext solution is best here.

Best,
--
Marnen Laibow-Koser
marnen@marnen.org
http://www.marnen.org