Summary

This talk aims to provide novice and advanced users of Rails i18n with valuable information on how to tackle translating and maintaining an internationalized and localized Rails application. The talk will give an insight into existing structures and techniques in Rails i18n and an overview of existing plugins and tools as well as an outlook on potential future developments.

Details

Rails has finally got a well thought-out i18n API that facilitates development of internationalized multi-language applications without having to wait for updates for Globalize et al. if a plugin didn’t work with the current Rails edge. Although developing an i18n application became much easier with the advent of Rails i18n, there are still some caveats and things worth knowing before getting started and ending up in a huge mess of unstructured translations. This talk therefore aims to provide beginners and advanced users of i18n with rock-solid information on how to tackle the difficult task of developing a multi-language application.

Topics discussed will be:

• Basic overview of the Rails i18n API and the Simple Backend that ships with Rails
• Locale files and standard namespaces
• Different approaches to doing the "same" thing (e.g. using translations vs. using different templates for translating a whole page)
• Overview of plugins and tools that facilitate development with i18n as well as current developments (e.g. experimental support for lambdas in translations and better pluralization)
• Outlook and information for people interested in getting actively involved in the development of Rails i18n and the community around it

This topic will be presented by Clemens Kofler (click for more details on Clemens and all our speakers).