Refactoring Ruby on Rails i18n YAML files using dictionaries

Question

This StackOverflow question gave me food for thought on what is a good structure for Rails i18n files, so I thought I\'d share another structure for refactoring Rails i18n y

Answer 1

I just release a gem called i18n-recursive-lookup that allows a definition to contain embedded references to other definitions by introducing the special embedded marker ${}

https://github.com/annkissam/i18n-recursive-lookup

Using it you could refactor your example to:

dictionary:
  email: Email
  name: Name
  password: Password
  confirmation: Confirmation

activerecord:
  attributes:
    user:
      email: ${dictionary.email}
      name: ${dictionary.name}
      password: ${dictionary.password}
      password_confirmation: ${dictionary.confirmation}
  models:
    user: User
users:
  fields:  
    email: ${dictionary.email}
    name: ${dictionary.name}
    password: ${dictionary.password}
    confirmation: ${dictionary.confirmation}
sessions:
  new:
    email: ${dictionary.email}
    password: ${dictionary.password}

The nice thing is that once compiled the translations are written back to the translation store so that all interpolation/recursive lookup happens once.

I know this might not answer the more philosophical questions about what the 'right' way to DRY up translations is, but I thought it's a better alternative to using the & label reference YML hack.