Rails I18n nested translation keys

Question

Is there a way to nest translation lookups? Something like this:

en:
  uh_oh: 'Uh Oh!'
  error1: :'uh_oh' + ' There was a big error!'
  error2: :'uh_oh' + ' There was another big error!'

I18n.t('error1') #=> 'Uh Oh! There was a big error!'
I18n.t('error2') #=> 'Uh Oh! There was another big error!'

I've tried a bunch of variations of this, and also tried it using a Ruby translation file instead of YAML. Note that this does work:

en:
  uh_oh: 'Uh Oh!'
  error1: :'uh_oh'

I18n.t('error1') #=> 'Uh Oh!'

But if I add additional text to error1, uh_oh doesn't get translated.

Basically I want to avoid having to always pass in common terms, like this:

en:
  uh_oh: 'Uh Oh!'
  error1: '%{uh_oh} There was a big error!'

I18n.t('error1', {uh_oh: I18n.t('uh_oh')})

For common terms like uh_oh, the interpolation is the same for every call to error1 (and any other key that uses uh_oh), so it doesn't really make sense to have to pass in a string to be interpolated. It'd be easier to do the following instead and have the error1 translation take care of the common key translation:

I18n.t('error1')

Answer 1

I'm not going to answer your question (I don't think it's possible with the i18n gem but could be wrong). I am going to say that you shouldn't take this approach and give you link [1] as background. As developers it's natural to see patterns and extract common code to keep things DRY. This is a step too far when dealing with multiple languages as it prevents proper translations. Not all languages follow the same sentence structure as english and what you're substituting in may have to change to agree with the rest of the sentence.

On a site I work on we have this problem with French. We have sentences that include a location name and this is straightforward in English. "%{location_name} property" works whatever the location name is. In French however, you need different structures depending on whether the location is a town, a province, a region, and whether the name starts with a vowel or not.

[1] http://www.multilingual.com/articleDetail.php?id=594