rails - how to dynamically add/override wording to i18n yaml

Question

as an example, i have a default english locale file "en.yml" with contents:

 en:
  messages: messages
  users: users

now, there is a customer which wants messages to be named discussions in his product, but users should remain users. so what i want to do is to create "customer.en.yml" file

en:
 messages: discussions

which would override the default "messages" translation, but would keep all the other words same. how can i achieve it?

because if i load en.yml with :

config.i18n.load_path += Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'config', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}')]

and afterwards load customer.en.yml (APP_CONFIG['customer_name'] is defined before) with

config.i18n.load_path += Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'config', 'custom_locales',  APP_CONFIG['customer_name']+'.{rb|yml}')]

it will just overwrite my "en" locale, and "users" translation will disappear, right?

Answer 1

It should not overwrite your "en" locale. Translations are merged. store_translations in the simple I18n backend calls merge_translations, which looks like this:

# Deep merges the given translations hash with the existing translations
# for the given locale
def merge_translations(locale, data)
  locale = locale.to_sym
  translations[locale] ||= {}
  data = deep_symbolize_keys(data)

  # deep_merge by Stefan Rusterholz, see http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/142809
  merger = proc { |key, v1, v2| Hash === v1 && Hash === v2 ? v1.merge(v2, &merger) : v2 }
  translations[locale].merge!(data, &merger)
end

As you can see, only the keys you enter in the latter translation yml file will be overwritten.

Answer 2

I wanted something similar when we were writing a pirate.yml translation, but I wanted anything not defined in pirate.yml to default to what we had in en.yml.

What I wrote can me found here: http://github.com/amiel/i18n_with_default

Answer 3

I think you might be mixing up two different things.

The i18n file is for translations.

If you have a client that needs an specific name for some field, that is not a translation issue, but functionality.

In other words, I think you need something like this:

 en:
   messages: messages
   users: users
   discussions: discussions

And then add the specific functionality somewhere else, for example in your view:

if(customer.needs_discussions?)
<%= t(:discussions) %>
else
<%= t(:messages) %>
end

Alternatively, you could add a string attribute to your customers, defaulting to 'messages'. Then your view would look like this:

<%= t(customer.messages_field_name) %>