Ruby Best Practices

Localizing Your Code

To make an application truly multilingual, we need to do more than just be able to process and produce text in different languages. We also need to provide a way for the user interface to be translated into the natural languages we wish to support. If you wanted to support even a small handful of languages, neither building multiple versions of your application nor writing tons of special casing wherever text is displayed will be a maintainable solution. Instead, what is needed is a way to mark the relevant sections of text with meaningful tags that can then be altered by external translation files. This is the process of localization (L10n).

We’re going to be looking at a tiny L10n package I put together when I realized there weren’t any Ruby 1.9-based tools available that worked outside of Rails. It is called Gibberish::Simple, and is a fork of the very cool Gibberish plug-in by Chris Wanstrath. The main modifications I made were to port the library to Ruby 1.9.1, remove all dependencies including the Rails integration, and change the system a bit so that it does not depend on core extensions. Other than that, all of the hard work was done by Chris and he deserves all the credit for the actual system, which, as you’ll see in a minute, is quite easy to use.

We’re going to first look at a very trivial web application using the Sinatra web framework. It implements the children’s game “Rock, Paper, Scissors.”^[11] We’ll look at it both before and after localization, ...