Rails gem: Localized pluralization with i18n

Paul Engel di 27 jul 10

As you are working on an internalization Rails application, you are maybe using Globalize2 along with I18n to translate models (e.g. categories). The end-user is probably able to manage the translations in different locales such as Dutch, German, French, Spanish and so forth.

>> I18n.locale
=> :en
>> (c = Category.first).name
=> "birthday"
>> I18n.locale = :nl
=> :nl
>> c.name
=> "verjaardag"
>> I18n.locale = :fr
=> :fr
>> c.name
=> "anniversaire"

Sometimes you want to display the translation in pluralized form. For instance:

>> I18n.locale
=> :en
>> "Found " + c.name.pluralize
=> "Found birthdays"

A solution to accomplish this is to translate both singular and plural form:

>> I18n.locale
=> :nl
>> I18n.t("found").capitalize + " " + c.name_pluralized
=> "Gevonden verjaardagen"

There are some cons though:

• you have to translate in singular AND plural form
• you have to use two columns (name and name_pluralized)

That’s some sort of redundancy as we want to keep things DRY: only translate in singular form and pluralize the translation. Fortunately, there is a Rails gem that does just that:

Rich-pluralization is a E9s module which pluralizes words with inflection rules of the current locale. You can compare it with the ActiveSupport::Inflector, except that the inflections do not influence the Rails pluralization (which is used for methods as tableize and classify).

Looking at our previous example, this is what the implementation can look like:

>> I18n.locale
=> :nl
>> I18n.t("found").capitalize + " " + c.name.pl
=> "Gevonden verjaardagen"

And of course, you can pluralize static strings:

>> I18n.locale
=> :nl
>> "Fiets".pl
=> "Fietsen"
>> "MUSEUM".pl
=> "MUSEA"

Please note: the letter casing stays preserved(!)

All in all, using Rich-pluralization provides you to only translate in singular form and call .pl for the pluralized translation. Now isn’t that a DRY implementation?

At the moment, Rich-pluralization is shipped with Dutch inflections. It covers 86% of the 54977 words provided by INL. This will increase as the developers are working hard on improving the inflections. Also, you can also add inflections for other locales.

Please visit the Github project page if you are interested for more information.

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