GetText / Rails

Translations are hard.
Use GetText, a Unix standard, instead of Rails-I18N.

Transcript

1. GetText
   I18N : internationalization
   

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2. $ finger abelar_s
   • EPITA MTI 2008
   • Using Rails since my 1st internship, sept.2006 (that was around rails 1.0)
   • R&D engineer at Faveod
   • We develop, market and sell our technology Faveod Designer
   • Faveod Designer helps you create complex web applications faster
   • You describe your specs and it just works. Easier, better, faster, stronger
   http://www.linkedin.com/in/sylvainabelard
   

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3. Meet GetText
   • Why?
   • You’ll want to make your app global
   • GetText is a UNIX standard
   • How?
   • Translators’ horror stories
   • Show me some code!
   • What?
   • Tools around GetText
   • Alternatives
   GNU GetText: GetText’s Never Useless
   

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4. Rails I18N
   • Simple
   • Always has a default
   • No complex keys
   • Never get « no translation found »
   • Never get fuzzy translations shown
   GNU GetText: GetText’s Never Useless
   

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5. Horror Stories
   No, really. Did you try?
   • One word, one translation?
   • Grammar: number, gender, case
   • Number looks simple enough: car/cars, but child/children and person/people
   • Many languages have a difference for one, two and more. Some have even more.
   • Gender is often masculine, feminine or neuter (and rarely intuitive)
   • Some languages have differences for inanimate and animate (personal or impersonal)
   • Conjugation: person, tense, mood, voice, aspect
   • ... ok, let’s not even try this
   

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6. What to use?
   • github.com/grosser/fast_gettext
   • Improvements
   • 3.5x faster, 560x less memory
   • thread safety
   • simple, clean namespace
   • Backends
   • .mo and .po files
   • .yml
   • DB
   • ... code your own
   Michael Grosser’s FastGetText!
   

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7. Setup
   • PO/MO files
   • These are where you store key / values per language
   • Many great tools for PO files, including an emacs mode
   • Setting the locale
   • You select the locale for each use (in Rails: request-wide, it’s thread-safe)
   • Setup
   How to GetText part 1
   GetText.locale = "fr"
   init_gettext "my_app"
   I18n.supported_locales = ["en", "fr", "de", "ar", "ru"]
   # better: make it guess from existing files
   I18n.default_locale = "fr" # en is the default
   

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8. Usage
   • The « underscore » function
   • _("string")
   • Variables, the printf way
   • _("string with %s") % "arg"
   • _("string with %s and %s") % ["arg1", "arg2"]
   • Variables, the right way
   • _("Could not find this %{obj}") % {:obj => _("stuff")}
   • Now on to our horror stories
   How to GetText part II
   

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9. Tricks
   • Singular / plural
   • n_("File not found!", "%{n} files not found!", n) % {:n => n}
   • That’s great, but how about tricky plurals?
   "Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=n == 1 ? 0 : 1;\n"
   • FastGettext.pluralisation_rule = lambda{|count|
   count > 5 ? 1 : (count > 2 ? 0 : 2)}
   • Context
   • s_("File|Open") # ouvrir
   • s_("Sports|Open") # open
   • s_("Even|More|Contexts|Open") # only translates ‘open‘
   • p_("even more bindinds", "for contexts", "open") # open
   How to GetText part III
   

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10. PO files
    • Update your files
    • rake updatepo
    • This will flag unused translations as obsolete and try to guess new ones (« fuzzy »)
    • Edit your files
    # translator comments
    #. extracted comments
    #: reference
    #, flag
    msgid "One file removed"
    msgid_plural "%d files removed"
    msgstr[0] "%d slika uklonjenih"
    msgstr[1] "%d slika uklonjenih"
    msgstr[2] "%d slika uklonjenih"
    • Update your translations
    • rake makemo
    Don’t do this manually, use tools.
    

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11. Questions?
    Also, we’re hiring, but that’s the next slide
    http://ruby-i18n.org/wiki
    http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html
    

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