How to add values dynamically to I18n?

Question

I have many ymls in my rails app, and i want to put some of them in other service, so that i can call this from multiple places. the response of this call will be a hash.

{"en" : 
  {"test" : 
    {"text1" : "hi english"},
    {"text2" : "mambo number %{num}"}
  },
 "es" : 
  {"test" : 
    {"text1" : "hi espaniol"},
    {"text2" : "mamboes numeros %{num}"}
  }
}

is there a way i can load that hash into I18n translations like

I18n.add_translations(some_hash)

so i can access them with

I18n.t("test.text1")
I18n.t("test.text2", :num => 5)

how can i achieve it?

Answer 1

The dirty way

You could override the load_translation method in I18n::Backend::Base through a custom module or gem or -- cough -- monkey patching -- cough -- to fetch the translations from different sources, it feels dirty to me but I guess you could try experimenting with that before going further.

https://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n/blob/master/lib/i18n/backend/base.rb#L13

Changing the I18n Backend

You can create a different I18n Backend that implements the expected behaviour and hook it up to I18n through an initializer. I'm assuming that's how tools like localeapp and phraseapp do it. There is a method just for that in I18n::Config

https://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n/blob/master/lib/i18n/config.rb#L23

So you can just do this in an initializer

I18n.backend = MyAwesomeI18nBackend.new

The good thing is that you can chain multiple backends together

I18n.backend = I18n::Backend::Chain.new(MyAwesomeI18nBackend.new)

It makes sure you still have access to the default translation backends or other custom backends.

References

Ryan made a great railscast back in the days explaining how to change backends. It's a bit outdated but it gives you a good idea of what needs to be done.

I18n Backends

If your translations are related to some data saved in a database, you could also use globalize to handle those.

https://github.com/globalize/globalize

EDIT: Simpler way by Dima

If you have a hash, you can use the default backend's store_translation method to load translations from that hash.

I18n.backend.store_translations(:en, {test: "YOOOOOHHHHHOOOO"})