Question

What is the best practice for building a multiple language website in Ruby on Rails?

Asked by: darinmurray

What is the best practice for building a multiple language website in Ruby on Rails?

I understand that rails does not like to switch db's, what about using multiple dbs simultaneously? one for each language, and can that be somehow dynamic (user can switch language by clicking a button)

Thanks in advance
Darin

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Asked On
2008-03-14 at 14:49:12ID23243184
Tags

Ruby on Rails

,

all

Topics

Ruby Scripting Language

,

MySQL Server

Participating Experts
3
Points
125
Comments
8

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    Answers

     

    by: adrpoPosted on 2008-03-15 at 22:14:16ID: 21135664


    Why not the same db? Have a table called translation:
    id | language_1 | language_2 | language_3 | language_4 ....
    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    1 | English         | Spanish       | .....
    ....

    Then everyhere where you need a translated string you put an
    id foreign_key in translation(id).

    You can then make a stored procedure: getString(id, language).
    See more here (PostgreSQL, but is similar in MySQL):
    http://www.ida.liu.se/~adrpo/db/ida/ida.sql
    Search for global.translate and global.out_t.

    Cheers,
    za-k/

     

    by: wesgarrisonPosted on 2008-03-16 at 15:35:45ID: 21138844

    Have you checked out the localization plugin?

    Here's the link to the plugin readme:
    http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/plugins/localization/README

    Features
     * Any number of languages or locales
     * Simple method to defines singluar/plural translations
     * Can use lambdas to provide Ruby-code based dynamic translations
     * Customizable for different instances of the application

    In short, you put your translations in separate files per language and then use <%_ 'yes' %> (with an underscore) which will give you "yes", "ja", or "oui" depending on the language set.

     

    by: bobbit31Posted on 2008-03-17 at 10:59:47ID: 21144528

    i use this plugin:

    http://simple-localization.arkanis.de/docs/index

    it's well documented, actively developed, and quite robust.

     

    by: darinmurrayPosted on 2008-03-17 at 11:31:42ID: 21144789

    bobbit31

    While looking at eh above site, all of the 'doc' pages have this line at the top "Note: This page is outdated and needs and update.". How out of date are they?

    And, is this switchable for the user? Or is this a one time localization for a given app, since the 'simple_localization :language => :en" goes in the environment.rb file.

    Thanks
    Darin

     

    by: bobbit31Posted on 2008-03-17 at 11:50:07ID: 21144939

    switchable per user.

    i'm not sure how out-dated the docs are. that said, i haven't run into very many problems using the samples provided.


     

    by: bobbit31Posted on 2008-03-17 at 11:53:11ID: 21144967

    oh and btw:

    simple_localization :language => :en

    means that you want to load the english lang file... if you are supporting more languages, you would do something like:

    simple_localization :languages => [:en, :es, :fr]

    All that does is pre-load the language files so you don't have to constantly read them in.

    To switch b/w languages... you can simply do:

    Localization.use :en (or any of the other languages you specified in environment.rb)

     

    by: wesgarrisonPosted on 2008-04-22 at 21:31:45ID: 21417795

    No comment has been added to this question in more than 21 days, so it is now classified as abandoned.

    I will leave the following recommendation for this question in the Cleanup Zone:
    Split between wesgarrison and bobbit31

    Any objections should be posted here in the next 4 days. After that time, the question will be closed.

    wesgarrison Experts Exchange Cleanup Volunteer

     

    by: darinmurrayPosted on 2008-04-25 at 12:31:24ID: 31439918

    Hi!

    I do apologize for not attending to this question.  I have been out of this project for a while.  I will assess points and revisit this when I continue with the project it pertains to.

    Thanks
    Darin

    20120131-EE-VQP-002

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