A Shameless Translation Memory Importer for Pontoon

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

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2026 retrospective
The repo at github.com/ifad/translation-memory is still public, still has no README, and the Pontoon fork it talks to remains private. Mozilla’s upstream is open and very much alive. Whether anyone at IFAD still runs Pontoon eight years on, I honestly don’t know — I built this for one project on my desk, not as a corporate workflow change. The hyphen-stripping regex did its job for the months I needed it. Then, presumably, the next Pontoon schema migration broke something. That’s what happens to integrations that talk to a database directly.

IFAD is a UN agency that operates in English, French, Spanish, and Arabic. Every public-facing string in our Rails apps needs to exist in four languages, which means we have a translation team, which means we have a translation workflow, which on most projects involves a desktop CAT tool, files attached to emails, and translation memories shipped around as XML.

That workflow does not survive a project I’m building right now. It’s a Rails web app on a tight schedule, the source strings change every week, and by the time a translator has finished a TM file and emailed it back the strings have already moved. I need translators and developers looking at the same database in real time. I pick Mozilla Pontoon — open-source, free, adaptable, written in Django, backed by Postgres — and stand it up for my project. The catch: there is a corpus of translations from the previous tool that I want to seed Pontoon with on day one, so the translators don’t start from a blank slate.

Today I start a translation-memory repo and write the first parser. The project is described, with all due engineering humility, as “Parser for TMX, SDL/XLIFF and TXML files and shameless importer into Mozilla Pontoon”. The “shameless” part is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Active Gibberish

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000

🔍

2026 retrospective
The Gibberish plugin and this entire approach are long dead. Rails 2.2 (2008) added built-in I18n support, and since Rails 3 the standard way is config/locales/*.yml with the i18n gem. ActiveRecord error messages, field names, and all UI strings are handled natively — no plugins, no monkey-patching.

UPDATE: you don’t need this code, because starting from the 2.2 version of Rails, localization support is built-in.

Localization for Active Record error messages¶

Today I had to answer one of the questions every non-English Rails developer stumbles upon sooner or later.. how to localize AR error messages for pleasant appearance to a non-english customer ;).

First off, thanks to defunkt’s excellent gibberish plugin and to the way AR validation errors are exposed, the task was accomplished in an easy and clean manner, without messing too much with AR’s internals.

I started by translating every default AR error message, with this translation file located in lang/it.yml:

# Active Record errors
#
ar_accepted:     "deve essere accettato" 
ar_not_a_number: "non è un numero" 
ar_blank:        "è un campo obbligatorio" 
ar_empty:        "è un campo obbligatorio" 
ar_inclusion:    "non è nella lista dei valori validi" 
ar_too_long:     "è troppo lungo (massimo %d caratteri)" 
ar_exclusion:    "è riservato" 
ar_too_short:    "è troppo corto (minimo %d caratteri)" 
ar_invalid:      "non è valido" 
ar_wrong_length: "è errato, dovrebbe essere di %d caratteri" 
ar_confirmation: "non corrisponde" 
ar_taken:        "esiste già" 
# This one is not a default key, but I use it in my validations
ar_greater_zero: "deve essere maggiore di zero"

and four lines in config/environment.rb:

Gibberish.current_language = :it
ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages =
  ActiveRecord::Errors.default_error_messages.inject({}) {|h, (key, string)|
    h.update(key => string["ar_#{key}".intern]) # <em>Gibberish magic</em>
}

The first one simply sets Italian (:it) as the default language, the inject builds a new error_messages hash using Gibberish to translate the default ones. I named every AR error key in my translation file with an “ar_” prefix, in order to avoid possible future key clashes. Finally, AR array is overwritten with the new one freshly built.

I18n on Marcello Barnaba

A Shameless Translation Memory Importer for Pontoon

Active Gibberish

Localization for Active Record error messages¶