Hook into Rails' I18n

Question

I've written a little library to hold translated content in model attributes. All you have to do is add the following to a model:

class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  i18n_attributes :title, :content
end

By convention, the data is written to the real attributes i18n_title and i18n_content as a hash (or hstore hash for Postgres). And a number of getters and setters give you access to "localized virtual attributes":

page = Page.new
page.title_en = 'Hello'
page.title_es = 'Hola'
page.i18n_title   # => { en: "Hello", es: "Hola" }
I18n.locale = :es
page.title        # => "Hola"
page.title_en     # => "Hello"

You can use these virtual attributes in forms as well, but there's a downside: The form builder uses I18n to get the label and translate attribute validation errors. And it does of course look for keys such as activerecord.attributes.page.title_en if you use title_enin the form.

It would be very cumbersome to replicate the same translation for every available_locale in the locales/en.yml etc files:

activerecord:
  attributes:
    page:
      title_en: "Title"
      title_es: "Title"
      ...

What I'd like to do is execute some code after Rails has loaded all locales in the boot process and then clone translations for these keys. Is there a way to do this? Maybe a hook which gets called after the translations have been loaded from the YAML files? (The translations are not yet loaded when my lib loads.)

Or do you see another way to tackle this problem? (I've tried to alias I18n.translate, but I'm afraid this might cause major headache in the future.)

Thanks for your hints!

Answer 1

Although you dropped this approach, please let me share my thoughts:

I don't think it is incredible useful to add other locale strings into a translation file for a specific localization. Since a config/locales/$locale.yml usually starts (at least in my case) with

$locale:
  ...

there is no need for activerecord.attributes.page.title_es in an English localization file. I'd just put it in es.yml as activerecord.attributes.page.title.

I mean: isn't that the whole purpose of separate localization files? (Or from the developer/translator point of view: In which file should I search for .title_es, in en.yml, es.yml or both?)