# RE: multilingual rails

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [November 12, 2005, 2:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484 "2005-11-12T14:55:18Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matthew)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 2:55pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484/1 "2005-11-12T14:55:18Z")

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I’ve been reading all the tutorials and blog entries I can find on this  
subject but one idea I haven’t seen floated yet is to do multilingual  
rails using what Rails is reallly quite good at database interaction.  
I’ve seen Sacha’s gettext/po/mo idea  
([Peak Obsession](http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/chapter/105)) and also an idea using  
.rb files by Per Wigren  
([http://www.tuxsoft.se/sv/oss/rails/multilingual](http://www.tuxsoft.se/sv/oss/rails/multilingual)) .

Has anybody thought about trying to do it like Vbulletin: the code for  
putting the right languages on the page, according to user preference,  
is part of the application but the actual translation and languages are  
all done through the database, which makes it very easy for the  
administrator and translator to do their work. It would mean that to  
translate your app, you would just need to give the translator access to  
you translation tables interface and let him get on with it, saving  
directly into the database. More control, less hassle.

In the database, there are language, phrase and even phrasegroup tables  
and then in the application they declare a global $vbphrase variable  
which is specified as  
$vbphrase['‘here\_goes\_your\_translated\_phrase\_reference\_string’] in each  
place where it is necessary to output text. The user chooses one of the  
available languages and this is recorded in his user profile in the DB  
and thus remembered and can be changed whenever they want. People who  
are not registered can also change the language through a drop down on  
each page. They have it set up not just for the actual phrases, but also  
left to right issues, time and dates, even seperators for decimals and  
thousands. All the changeable stuff is stored in a database and the code  
interprets that.

So, my 0.02â?¬ to the I18N ideas. If anybody likes the idea, I can dig out  
all the flows and code references from Vbullletin and we could see how  
we might apply it for rails.

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**Author:** ![matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matthew)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 3:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484/2 "2005-11-12T15:25:09Z")

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Hi Matthew,

this is already being worked on and will be released in the hopefully  
not  
so distant future. So hang tight.

Sascha E.

PS: If you search the archives you might find what I am talking about.

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**Author:** ![matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matthew)\
**Post date:** [November 12, 2005, 6:18pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484/3 "2005-11-12T18:18:34Z")

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Sacha,

That’s good news. I’ll have a look in the archives. I would love to help  
out with this if I possibly could. It’s one of the few areas where I  
feel I might have something to offer. 🙂

Matthew.

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**Author:** ![matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matthew)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2006, 9:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484/4 "2006-05-11T21:45:14Z")

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might want to check out:

[http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsLocalization](http://wiki.rubyonrails.com/rails/pages/RailsLocalization)

at the bottom there are four solutions listed, but i don’t think there  
is yet any real consensus on which is the best.

Gloablize  
Localize  
GLoc  
Multilingual

anyone here have any experience with these they’d like to share?

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**Author:** ![matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/ed655f/32.png) [@matthew](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/matthew)\
**Post date:** [May 11, 2006, 9:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/re-multilingual-rails/50484/5 "2006-05-11T21:54:02Z")

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Looking at the “multilingual” web page, it looks like a project that has  
died. It was an  
attempt to supersede the i18n/l10n paradigm.

Warren