an i18n journey

An i18n JourneyAndy Waite November 2013

notonthehighstreet.com notonthehighstreet.de

Basics

Lots of extracting to t(…) and l(…)

rails-i18n gem helps a lot for supported languages.

Coverage of dates, times, numbers, error messages.

But doesn’t help for JavaScript-heavy sites

Single or Separate DBs?Each site to have separate products and suppliers

Scoping everything by site - massive amount of work.

Site was MySQL so couldn’t use Postgres schemas for multi-tenancy (Apartment gem).

Went with separate DBs for UK and German sites.

Schema migrations run on both sites to keep schemas the same.

But used primary key offsets so that we could potentially merge back together in future.

Database State Values

Generally not i18n friendly

<%= order.status.titleize %>

Order.where(status: ‘shipped’)

TimezonesChanging timezone -> broken tests -> usually due to a badly designed test

Zonebie gem (time zone randomization)

Time.parse -> Time.zone.parse

Time.now -> Time.zone.now

.to_time -> .to_time_in_current_zone

Use ISO8601 for APIs (“2012-03-16T14:55:33Z")

Credit Cards

Two-thirds of Germans don’t own a credit card

Second lowest credit card use in all of EU

‘debt’ == ‘guilt’ (Schuld)

Capitalization

German is the only language in the world that requires the capitalization of ALL nouns.

der amerikanische Präsident

#titleize considered harmful

Crazy PluralizationEnglish / German: one, other

Icelandic:

one: 1, 21, 31, 41, 51, 61, …, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3

other 0, 2-20, 22-30, 32-40, …, 0.0, 2.0, 3.0, …

Arabic:

zero 0, 0.0, …

one 1, 1.00, 1.0, …

two 2, 2.00, 2.00, 2.0, …

few 3-10, 103-110, 203-210, …, 3.00, 3.00, 4.00, …

many 11-99, 111-199, 211-299, …, 11.00, 11.00, 12.00, …

other 100-102, 200-202, 300-302, …, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, …

http://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/language_plural_rules.html

blog.andywaite.com @andyw8

Lessons Learned

Stick to Rails conventions

Demo to native speakers as early as you can

Consider i18n-friendly-by-default approach:

Store all strings in YAML config

Wrap date/number/currency calls in l(…) in views