Globalization and Localization
==============================

Globalization refers to the process of making your code ready to be translated.
This typically consists of modifying your code so that it will use translated strings
if they are provided and extracting strings so that they can be translated

Localization refers to translating the extracted strings to a target language.

The underscore character is the name of the localization function:

  _('Hi friend') => 'Hola amigo'

Note: Use single quotes for messages that do not contain replacement variables

Of course, in HTML you need to replace string with ruby out brackets.

  <p>Nifty page</p>
  
Globalized is:

  <p><%= _('Nifty page') %></p>
  
I highly recommend creating a macro for doing this if your editor supports it.

Things get a little tricky when you have strings that contain parameters. For example:

  <p>Hi <%= current_user.login %>! You last logged in <%= current_user.last_logged_in_at %> ago.</p>
  
Different languages might even change the order that the variables appear in the translated message
so the variables must be referred to by name. The previous example can be globalized as:  

  <p><%= _("Hi %{logged_in_user}! You last logged in %{last_login_date} ago") % {:logged_in_user => current_user.login, 
  :last_login_date => current_user.last_logged_in_at} %></p>

Once you have globalized your rails app, the rake updatepo task will automatically extract the strings
from your files and generate a po template for you in the root of your app's po directory.

Notice the percents instead of the hash mark (#) are used to specify replacement variables.
If you use #{} in your messages, gettext will not extract the strings.

Notice that you must use double quotes instead of single quotes when specifying a message
that contains variables to be replaced.