I18n::MissingTranslations

I18n::MissingTranslations is a simple tool that helps with finding missing translations in your application.

It consists of three parts:

• a module that plugs into the I18n::ExceptionHandler class and logs I18n::MissingTranslationData exceptions
• an in-memory logger that simply holds missing translations during a request or test run
• a middleware that can be used to dump the contents of the logger to a file after each request

I18n::MissingTranslations requires I18n 0.5.0 which has not been released yet (2010-11-06). So you need to make sure you require the 0.5.0 branch from the I18n repository:

gem 'i18n', :git => 'git://github.com/svenfuchs/i18n.git', :ref => '0.5.0'

This is what you might want to put into your test_helper:

require 'i18n/missing_translations'
at_exit { I18n.missing_translations.dump }

If there are any missing translations then it will print out a YAML snippet for them that you can copy and paste to your locale file.

The following hooks up the I18n::MissingTranslations middleware in development mode. You might want to add these lines as an initializer:

require 'i18n/missing_translations'
config.app_middleware.use(I18n::MissingTranslations) if Rails.env.development?

The middleware will then log missing tranlations to a file missing_translations.yml in your locales dir (which is config/locales if present or the current directory otherwise). You can also pass the filename as an argument:

config.app_middleware.use(I18n::MissingTranslations, 'path/to/locales/missing.yml')

The middleware reads and writes per request. That means that on subsequent requests missing translations are added to the missing_translations.yml file. So if you go ahead and copy translations from the missing_translations.yml to your actual locale files you will also want to clear or delete missing_translations.yml.

NOTE Rails (3.0.1) does not pick up new locale files between requests. That effectively means that manual changes to the missing_translations.yml file might be overwritten unless you restart the server.

Thus your workflow for finding and moving missing translation keys might look something like this:

• start the server
• click around/work on stuff
• check config/locales/missing_translations.yml
• copy any missing translation keys to your actual locale files and correct the translations
• delete or clear config/locales/missing_translations.yml
• restart the server