How to internationalize content on ruby on rails?

Question

How can I internationalize say a categories table (with a name column) into different languages. How about a products table (consisting of a name and description columns). Which is the best way to internationalize the content of these database tables using Ruby on Rails?

Answer 1

Have you taken a look at: http://guides.rubyonrails.org/i18n.html

It describes in some detail how to internationalise your application and

"provides an easy-to-use and extensible framework for translating your application to a single custom language other than English or for providing multi-language support in your application."

Some useful links:

• http://rails-i18n.org/
• http://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n
• http://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/tree/master/rails/locale

Answer 2

If you want to store the values for the different languages in the db next to the standard Rails i18n (yml), you could do something like this:

Products table name field:

• name_en
• name_fr
• name_nl

Fetch the correct value:

def i18n_db_value(object, attribute)
  object.send("#{attribute.to_s}_#{I18n.locale}") if object
end