Rails i18n Config File Management Best Practices

Question

I'm in the process doing an i18n conversion of a RoR website. I'm using Sven Fuchs textmate bundle along with NewDesk's translate plugin. I've started with the yaml files provided by Sven Fuchs here (http://github.com/svenfuchs/rails-i18n/tree/3e1994d137e1785689e39f6e957087d3baed0011/rails/locale)

I'm rapidly seeing keys getting out of sync between files, managing between development instances is becoming painful, updates in prod using the "FROM=en TO=ru rake translate:google" task or "rake translate:merge_keys"

• What are best practices for the proliferation of yaml translation files?
• What are best practices for the synchronization of yaml files across environments?

Answer 1

Have you considered generating the files from a database? I'm not sure of other's opinions on this but I needed to provide an interface to a client project to edit the internationalization information.

So I put each into a language profile for the entire site, and let them edit it. They have a button to generate the latest files according to build.. maybe you could figure out something that worked for you like that? What I ended up doing is storing each database row with a translation to have a version number. So based on what I'm turning live, it will find that and everything older... Technically having new content in the language files isn't going to hurt you either since it simply won't be used.