Ruby on Rails Localization

The most common library for internationalizing and localizing Ruby on Rails applications is rails-i18n. A detailed guide on how to use it in your Rails applications can be found here: Rails I18n API.

Besides other file formats YAML is the most commonly used format for internationalizing Rails applications.
YAML is a human-readable data serialization format. Unlike some other formats, YAML has a well defined standard.

Format

  • Key-value pairs are delimited with colon (:).
  • Values can be surrounded by single or double quotes.
  • YAML has a lot of other rules on how to mark value blocks. Eg. using “key: |” for multi-line values.
  • Rails I18n uses the hierarchical style to structure your file (see example below).
  • Multiple languages are allowed in one Rails I18n YAML file. But this approach is hardly used and we recommend to use one file per language.
  • The first level always has to define the language of the following translations according to ISO_639-1. LingoHub will use the language information from the file content.
  • Comments start with a hash sign (#) and are ignored by all known parsers. But in the LingoHub context, all comment lines are parsed directly preceding a key-value pair (with no blank lines in between) and are treated as translation descriptions or LingoCheck rules belonging to that line.
  • The placeholder syntax is: %{name}, where “name” can consist of multiple non-whitespace characters.
  • LingoHub is aware of parsing array structures.
  • UTF-8 is the default encoding for Rails I18n YAML files.
  • LingoHub is capable to parse both array syntax types (see example below), but cannot guarantee that the same syntax is used when exporting the file.
  • LingoHub cannot guarantee to use the same quoting and escaping as imported when exporting a file, but will always produce a syntactically correct file.

Example

Additional example files can be accessed here.