Webinterface for Rails i18n-activerecord

Installation

add Translator to your: Gemfile

gem 'translator', git: 'https://github.com/forecastxl/translator.git'

Add the styles to your: app/assets/stylesheets/application.css

*= require translator

Add the javascripts to your: app/assets/javascripts/application.js

//= require translator

Include this module in your main controller: app/controllers/application_conroller.rb

include Translator::Reset

Place this function in your: app/config/routes.rb

Tip: place this somewhere down the bottom of your routes.rb if this not called often or if it is not vital to the working of your app.

translator_routes

Add the 'translator' css class to any html element you want to trigger the translator popup. It will add a click event to the event, that will open the modal. There is a 2 second delay in the assignment of the clickhandler to allow any async event to be fired and trigger more translation lookups. To any element with the 'translator' class the 'translator-attention' will be added when 1 or more untranslated keys are found, you can attach your own styles to this class to attract attention of the translators. You can also add the 'translator-counter' class to any element. A span will be created in that element with the number of untranslated keys on that page.

<a href='#' class='translator'>Translate</a>

You can also call the following Javascript function directly to make the translator modal open.

new Translator().openModal()

Apartment

If you have the apartment gem included in your project make sure to add the translation classes to your list of excluded models (assuming that you do not want to store translations per tenant):

Apartment.configure do |config|
  config.excluded_models = %w(
    I18n::Backend::ActiveRecord::Translation
    Translator::Translation
  )
end

Migration

If you have already have translations in a certain backend and decide to move to a different one you can run a task to copy the translations into the new backend.

• Make sure the target backend exists before copying
• The task copies the translations to the target, it will NOT destroy the translations in the source
• If any keys already exist in the target backend then their values will be overwritten
• Keys in the target backend that do not exist in the source will remain untouched

Limitations

• At this moment only the possible to copy from simple(yaml) to activerecord backend.

rake translator:simple_to_activerecord

Configuration

Security

Translator implements no means of security or role-based access rights. Probably the easiest way of limiting who can translate is by enabling the routes to only the translators or only in specific environments.

If you are using Devise the authenicate users you can change your routes.rb to something like this.

authenticate :user, lambda { |user| user.admin? } do
  translator_routes
end

and/or

translator_routes if Rails.env.staging?

Styling

If you don't like the way the modal looks you can override the styles or define your own. Just make sure that your css is required later in the application.css file then the translator.css. If you don´t like any of it you can choose not to require the translator.css altogether.

There is no html you can edit because all DOM elements are created on the fly by javascript. If you want to change that you can copy the translator.js to your project and edit it your own liking.

TODO

• Fix the more complex interpolation in the modal
  • When getting the result from t() then the interpolations already took place
  • How to get the string that will be used for the interpolations?
• Add tests

Nice to haves

• Retreive the translations only once? (and clear the cache at the same time?)
• Start modal with keys without translation
• Show the translation of a key in different languages
• Show the result of Google translate (or similar webservice)
• Warn when one or more translations are missing. Maybe directly open the modal when any are missing.
• Maybe show all translations have been tried before the current one was found. This shows the translator and developer which translations are looked up without success.