smallroomsoftware.com

I had a session preparing the Rentability front-end for localization the other day. Luckily I found the Gibberish rails plugin which makes localizing the static text fairly painless - you can store the translated strings in yml files, and the syntax is very simple. I made a slight patch to gibberish so it'll print the key next to each string on the live app so that the human translator can see where each key is used on the running site:

module Gibberish
  module Localize
    alias_method :old_translate, :translate
    def translate(string, key, *args)
      str = old_translate(string, key, *args)
      "#{str} <span class=\"translation-key\">#{key}</span>"
    end
  end
end

You can put that in environment.rb (maybe if RAILS__ENV == 'development'). Here's some CSS:

span.translation-key {
  font-size: 11px;
  font-weight: normal;
  color: black;
  background-color: yellow;
  font-family: geneva;
  border: 1px solid #444;
  padding: 0 1px;
  text-transform: none;
  font-style: normal;
}