MyUtil™

I wanted to prototype my Gibberish translations before we have an actual translator. I grabbed gibberish_translate and started copying and pasting from Google Language Tools.

After five minutes of this, I thought there has got to be a better way. I googled for an API to the Google tools, and though I found none, I did find a scraping Ruby API called rtranslate. So…

gem install googletranslate

Then I hacked the index method of translations_controller.rb from gibberish_translate. I added the following lines of code


  require 'rtranslate'
  def index
     # ...Mark's entire index method goes here unchanged
    if params[:filter] == "untranslated"
      count=0
      @paginated_keys.each do |key|  
        if ! @translated_messages[key]
          @translated_messages[key] = { 
          :to => Translate.t(@en_messages[key], Language::ENGLISH, session[:translation_locale] ),
          :from => @en_messages[key]
          }
        end
        break if (count += 1) == per_page
        sleep 1 # Let's be nice to google
      end
    end
  end
 # end of index from gibberish_translate's translations_controller.rb

And now Google does the work for me with the click of a mouse!

Note I did make some other changes to Mark’s code. There was a bug in translations_controller.rb in that it lost your current local when saving changes. To fix this I changed the set_translation_locale to use the session of there is no paramater:


  def set_translation_locale
    session[:translation_locale] = params[:translation_locale] if params[:translation_locale]
    session[:translation_locale] = Gibberish.languages.first if Gibberish.languages if ! session[:translation_locale]
  end

I also made some changes to gibberish_translate’s extractor.rb to handle Gibberish strings with default keys ("foo"[] is a valid Gibberish way of saying "foo"[:foo]):


    def message_pattern(start_token, end_token)
      /#{start_token}((?:[^#{end_token}](?:\\#{end_token})?)+)#{end_token}\[:*([a-z_]*)[,\]]/m
    end

    def add_messages(contents, start_token, end_token)
      contents.scan(message_pattern(start_token, end_token)).each do |text, key|
        key = text.tr('[  ]', '_').downcase if ( key == '' )
        add_message(key, remove_quotes(text, end_token))
      end
    end

The final tweaks I made was to make the find system call more portable (no -regex on OpenBSD) and also have it search for strings in my gibberish_rails plugin:


    def files_with_messages
      `find #{dirs_to_search.join(" ")} -type f '(' -name '*rb' -or -name '*.ml' ')'`.split.map(&:chomp)
    end

    def dirs_to_search
      %w(app config lib vendor/plugins/gibberish_rails).map { |dir| "#{RAILS_ROOT}/#{dir}" }
    end

Peace!

With migrating from Rails 1 to Rails 2, I have tried to simplify. When I wanted to prototype a multilingual Rails application I was very intrigued by Gibberish and it’s simplicity.

As all Gibberish does is translate strings and all this plugin attempts to do is translate srings in Rails. This plugin is in a very early prototype stage but I expect it to be useful none the less.

If you want full localization of dates, numbers, the world etc. check out some of the other more mature localization plugins.

If you are trying to localize your Rails strings with Gibberish, then this plugin is for you.

When I set out I didn’t even expect to make a plugin, just write some simple ruby in my project. However, it turns out there is a reason for the bloat in localization plugins…rails was never designed to be localized and has some quirks that lead to the necessity of overriding large core rails methods. The rails core team is obviously aware the problem and are working on a solution with ticket 9726. I’m hoping Rails ticket 9726 will make it to edge and then I’ll be able to simplify this plugin.

Without further adieu, I give you gibberish_rails.

Here is a link to the RDoc.

Quickie instructions (includes install for Gibberish).

./script/plugin install svn://errtheblog.com/svn/plugins/gibberish
./script/plugin install http://svn.myutil.com/projects/plugins/gibberish_rails/

Please read the README in it’s entirety before using.

Now you must translate your strings. I recommend using gibberish_translate. My next article will be on automatic prototyping translations with gibberish_translate and Google Language Tools.

Things you might find useful

Prototype translations for Gibberish with Google Language Tools, a mouse click, and 13 lines of code

gibberish_rails: a Ruby-On-Rails plugin to translate Rails with Gibberish

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