Working L10N solution for Rails 3.2

Question

I'm developing a multilingual (EN/RU) website and I need a solution allowing me to translate database records?

Are there any third-party plugins allowing you to maintain a multilingual website? Ideally it should work with rails_admin (or scaffolding at the worst case) and and routing-filter.

I use globalize3 now and it creates a translation via rails_admin as well. But there's no way to specify the locale. It only creates a translation for your current locale, i.e. there's no way to translate records really because it just copies the original entry. And I see no way to create english translations.

Thanks in advance!

Gemfile

source 'https://rubygems.org'

gem 'rails', '3.2.0'

gem 'sqlite3'
gem 'pg', :require => 'pg'
gem 'memcache-client'

# Gems used only for assets and not required
# in production environments by default.
group :assets do
  gem 'sass-rails',   '~> 3.2.3'
  gem 'coffee-rails', '~> 3.2.1'
  gem 'uglifier', '>= 1.0.3'
end

gem 'jquery-rails'
gem 'russian'
gem 'dynamic_form'
gem 'friendly_id', '~> 4.0.0'
gem 'routing-filter'
gem 'devise'
gem 'cancan'
gem 'paper_trail', '~> 2'
gem 'rails_admin', :git => 'git://github.com/sferik/rails_admin.git'
gem 'globalize3', '~> 0.2.0.beta6', :git => 'git://github.com/svenfuchs/globalize3.git'

# To use ActiveModel has_secure_password
# gem 'bcrypt-ruby', '~> 3.0.0'

# To use Jbuilder templates for JSON
# gem 'jbuilder'

gem 'unicorn'
gem 'capistrano'

# To use debugger
# gem 'ruby-debug19', :require => 'ruby-debug'

config/application.rb

config.i18n.load_path += Dir[Rails.root.join('my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}').to_s]
config.i18n.default_locale = :ru

models/page.rb

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  translates :title, :content
  validates_presence_of :title
end

Rails console output:

Loading development environment (Rails 3.2.0)
1.9.3p0 :001 > p = Page.new(:title => 'Test 1')
  Page::Translation Load (0.2ms)  SELECT "page_translations".* FROM "page_translations" WHERE "page_translations"."page_id" IS NULL AND "page_translations"."locale" = 'ru' LIMIT 1
 => #<Page id: nil, title: "Test 1", slug: nil, content: nil, created_at: nil, updated_at: nil> 
1.9.3p0 :002 > p.save
   (0.1ms)  begin transaction
  SQL (13.9ms)  INSERT INTO "pages" ("content", "created_at", "slug", "title", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?)  [["content", nil], ["created_at", Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:01:28 MSK +04:00], ["slug", nil], ["title", "Test 1"], ["updated_at", Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:01:28 MSK +04:00]]
  SQL (0.5ms)  INSERT INTO "page_translations" ("content", "created_at", "locale", "page_id", "title", "updated_at") VALUES (?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?)  [["content", nil], ["created_at", Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:01:28 MSK +04:00], ["locale", "ru"], ["page_id", 5], ["title", nil], ["updated_at", Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:01:28 MSK +04:00]]
  Page::Translation Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "page_translations".* FROM "page_translations" WHERE "page_translations"."page_id" = 5 AND "page_translations"."locale" = 'ru' LIMIT 1
   (0.4ms)  UPDATE "page_translations" SET "title" = 'Test 1', "updated_at" = '2012-01-24 10:01:28.298579' WHERE "page_translations"."id" = 5
  Page::Translation Load (0.1ms)  SELECT "page_translations".* FROM "page_translations" WHERE "page_translations"."id" = ? LIMIT 1  [["id", 5]]
   (2.2ms)  commit transaction
 => true

Answer 1

If you have only two languages, it's better to keep translations in the same table, e.g.:

create_table "articles" do |t|
  ...
  t.column "title_ru", :string
  t.column "title_en", :string
  t.column "body_ru", :text
  t.column "body_en", :text
  ...
end

And then extend ActiveRecord::Base class to provide method for translation:

module Translate

  def self.included(base)
    base.extend ClassMethods
  end

  module ClassMethods
    def translate *columns
      columns.each do |column|
        class_eval <<-EOV
          def #{column}
            unless self.send("#{column}_#{I18n.locale}")
              self.send("#{column}_#{I18n.locale}")
            else
              #{column}_#{I18n.default_locale}
            end
          end
        EOV
      end
    end

  end

end

ActiveRecord::Base.send :include, Translate

After that, call that method from your model:

class Article < ActiveRecord::Base
  ...
  translate :title, :body
  ...
end

And now you can edit both title_ru and title_en entries without globalize3.