# Ruby-GetText picking random languages (up to 3 on the same page!)

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757>\
**Category:** Rails I18n\
**Created:** [February 2, 2010, 11:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757 "2010-02-02T11:24:43Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 5\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/898d66/32.png) [@psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/psy-q)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2010, 11:24am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757/1 "2010-02-02T11:24:43Z")

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Hi everyone,

We have recently upgraded our project from Rails 2.1.x to Rails 2.3.x,  
and in the process also had to upgrade our Ruby-GetText.

Our config/environment.rb now refers to these GetText gems:

config.gem “gettext”  
config.gem “gettext\_activerecord”, :version =\> ‘\>= 2.1.0’  
config.gem “gettext\_rails”, :version =\> ‘\>= 2.1.0’

Things seemed to go well as everything now works fine on the  
development workstations. But our production server uses a mod\_proxy  
cluster of Mongrel servers. It seems that now that multiple servers  
are involved, Ruby-GetText (or some other component) causes confusion.  
When using our language selector and switching languages, the language  
is only consistent after the very first request. If you do as much as  
reload the page, you may end up with parts of the page in any of the  
languages you had previously chosen.

I managed to end up with a page rendering in German, English and  
Spanish at the same time. Even within one partial, the language may  
change – the first few columns of a table were labeled in German  
while the rest was Spanish.

Our language switcher is an almost direct copy of the “default\_locale”  
method in the Ruby-GetText documentation:

[http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-howto-rails.html#before%2Fafter\_init\_gettext](http://www.yotabanana.com/hiki/ruby-gettext-howto-rails.html#before%2Fafter_init_gettext)

The current code is here, in the define\_locale method:

[http://code.zhdk.ch/projects/leihs/browser/trunk/app/controllers/application\_controller.rb](http://code.zhdk.ch/projects/leihs/browser/trunk/app/controllers/application_controller.rb)

I’ve placed some logging around those bits of the method that save the  
user’s language to the database, and that seems to work fine, the  
language is always saved correctly and always retrieved correctly.  
Before the set\_locale call the GetText.locale.current might be wrong,  
but after set\_locale it always returns the correct locale. Yet the  
page is translated in any wild way to any language.

GetText initialization seems to work, because if I replace that method  
with this:

def define\_locale  
set\_locale ‘de\_CH’  
end

The language is always German (Switzerland) and all the spooky  
language flipping stops.

Are we making any massive mistakes in our language setting? It has  
worked fine since Rails 1.2.x through 2.0.x when we did our last  
upgrade, but perhaps we missed something? Maybe the problem only  
appears when using mod\_proxy and mongrel\_cluster?

Any further information or speculation would be very welcome.

Kind regards,

Ramón

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/898d66/32.png) [@psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/psy-q)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2010, 12:08pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757/2 "2010-02-02T12:08:02Z")

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Just a thought, are you fragment caching anything ?

Justin

2010/2/2 Ramón Cahenzli [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid):

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/898d66/32.png) [@psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/psy-q)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2010, 1:22pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757/3 "2010-02-02T13:22:48Z")

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On Feb 2, 12:07 pm, Justin MacCarthy [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote:

> Just a thought, are you fragment caching anything ?

We suspsected that too, but then discovered that it’s one of the  
_other_ applications where we do fragment caching 🙂 So no, this one  
is innocent.

But thanks for the suggestion. I am now desperate enough to hack Ruby-  
GetText itself to find out what it think is going on. Because if both  
Ruby-GetText _and_ Rails agree about the locale they are setting and  
the both agree about what language to deliver each page in, then it’s  
getting spookier and spookier.

Ramón

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/898d66/32.png) [@psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/psy-q)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2010, 3:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757/4 "2010-02-02T15:31:28Z")

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And hi again,

I have “fixed” the issue, but I didn’t actually find out what’s  
causing the problem. I noticed that when I append ?lang=de\_CH to a  
URL, the whole page is in the same language, absolutely no matter what  
the locale is set to. So now I’m overwriting params[:lang] on every  
request, because in our case, we never retrieve the language from the  
query string anyhow, so this is okay.

The “fix” is here:

[http://code.zhdk.ch/projects/leihs/browser/trunk/app/controllers/application\_controller.rb](http://code.zhdk.ch/projects/leihs/browser/trunk/app/controllers/application_controller.rb)

And here again:

before\_init\_gettext :define\_locale

def define\_locale  
if params[:locale]  
set\_locale params[:locale]  
params[:lang] = params[:locale] # Bug? Gettext seems not to set  
the language properly unless this is set  
current\_user.update\_attributes(:language\_id =\> Language.first  
(:conditions =\> {:locale\_name =\> params[:locale]})) if logged\_in?  
else  
locale = logged\_in? ? current\_user.language.locale\_name :  
Language.default\_language.locale\_name  
set\_locale locale  
params[:lang] = locale # Bug? Gettext seems not to set the  
language properly unless this is set  
end  
end  
init\_gettext ‘leihs’

I still don’t know if the core issue is with some silliness in our  
code or whether it’s somewhere in Ruby-GetText, but I will leave this  
ugly code in place for now as we need to deploy tonight. I’d still be  
happy about any reports of similar issues, or a better solution 😉

Ramón

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/898d66/32.png) [@psy-q](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/psy-q)\
**Post date:** [February 2, 2010, 2:21pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-gettext-picking-random-languages-up-to-3-on-the-same-page/182757/5 "2010-02-02T14:21:44Z")

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Hi again,

I experimented a bit. I put this ugly thing into the gettext gem’s  
gettext.rb to see if set\_locale sets the right locale:

def set\_locale(lang)  
logfile = File.open("/tmp/gettext.log", “a+”)  
logfile.puts("set\_locale requested for: " + lang.to\_s)  
logfile.close  
Locale.set\_app\_language\_tags(lang)  
Locale.default = lang  
Locale.current = lang  
end

And indeed the locale arrives correctly on each and every request. I  
made a new test environment with two Mongrel servers running behind  
mod\_proxy in round-robin fashion. No one else is using this test  
environment, so I can be almost sure that every time I reload the  
page, another Mongrel server answers it. Now on every single reload, I  
see another constellation of random languages, but it is the same  
constellation each time, unless I call define\_locale.

For example:

(Mongrel no. 1 is serving)  
Left sidebar: English  
Top navigation: German  
Main content pane: Spanish

–\> Reload

(Now Mongrel no. 2 is serving)  
Left sidebar: German  
Top navigation: English  
Main content pane: English

–\> Reload

(Mongrel no. 1 is serving again)  
Left sidebar: English  
Top navigation: German  
Main content pane: Spanish

The weird thing is that my log file produces this on EACH one of those  
requests:

set\_locale requested for: de\_CH  
set\_locale requested for: de\_CH  
set\_locale requested for: de\_CH

So set\_locale arrives at every request, it is always for the same  
language, yet Mongrel serves any part of the content in any language  
it likes (?).

And further ideas are very much appreciated. In the meantime I am  
trying to set up a server environment with mod\_rails to see if Mongrel  
and mod\_proxy are the problem.

Kind regards,

Ramón