paulca / merge_translation

MergeTranslation

The problem: When writing a localised app, I write in English and I maintain the en.yml translation file. Halfway through development, I ship out the en.yml file to my translator, for say, French (fr.yml) … he updates the translations. Two weeks later, I have added lots of translations to the en.yml file, so the fr.yml file is out of date. What do I do? Enter merge_translation.

Example

Say you have an en.yml and it looks a bit like this:

en: beef: Beef chicken: Chicken pork: Pork

But your French file is out of date, it looks like this:

fr: beef: Boeuf chicken: Poulet

This is ok for a small file, but when a translation file gets to hundreds of lines, it gets out of hand.

merge_translation solves this with a simple rake task:

rake translations:merge[fr,en]

This takes config/locales/en.yml and merges it with config/locales/fr.yml giving:

fr: beef: Boeuf chicken: Poulet pork: Pork

Then the French translator can run through the file updating the English to French. Woop!

Requirements

Due to some unicode issues when dumping accented characters back to YAML, the out of the box Ruby YAML library doesn’t cut it, so I used ‘ya2yaml’ … a simple gem install will get it:

gem install ya2yaml

Extras

If you’re using the default en-US locale, you can just hit:

rake translations:merge[fr]

If you’re not storing translations in config/locales/ you can pass in a path:

rake translations:merge[fr,en,lib/locales/]

If you’re not storing your translation files in YAML format, then this plugin won’t help … sorry! Feel free to fork and modify!

Copyright © 2008 Paul Campbell, released under the MIT license