Dummy Locale

Dummy Locale builds a complete copy of the specified source locale at runtime.

Product Manager: "We need to ensure our application is ready for internationalization."

Developer: "Alright, I have extracted all strings to translations."

Product Manager: "How can I verify this work is complete?"

Developer: "Umm..."

Even if the product manager takes your assertion on faith, you've likely missed labels generated by form builders, full error messages displayed when re-rendering forms, and other strings that Rails defaults to English via humanize. Even raising on missing translations will fail to catch these.

Dummy Locale builds a complete copy of your source locale, with each value "translated" by bracketing it with the locale. For example, in the default configuration, a key that translates to "Example" in the source locale will translate to "ZZExampleZZ" in the dummy locale.

The application remains usable but allows developers and product managers to easily see which strings may have been missed.

Add gem "dummy_locale" to your Gemfile and bundle. It is recommended this be added to development and staging environments.

Create config/initializers/dummy_locale.rb like so:

if defined?(DummyLocale)
  DummyLocale.generate(source_locale: :en, destination_locale: :zz)
end

Those are the default values for source_locale and destination_locale. They can be omitted if desired.

Run rails server, visit your application, and switch your locale to the destination_locale.

Dummy Locale is maintained by Derek Prior