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Lost in (Rails) translation

Lit stands for “Lost in translation” and it describes mountable Rails engine that helps you and your client with translating Rails applications. As most of our work is made for foreign clients, we know the pain of translating few thousand phrases. You can use YAML files and forward them to the client. Good luck with that - it only confuses people. That's why we've started looking for an easier way - web interface for managing I18n translations.

Lit - “Lost in translation”.

As most of our work is made for foreign clients, we know the pain of translating few thousand phrases. You can use YAML files and forward them to the client. Good luck with that: it only confuses people.

That's why we've started looking for an easier way - web interface for managing I18n translations. Of course – there was Copycopter (now open-sourced) and there are one or two commercial apps that you can use, but they did not meet our needs:

First – we wanted something that is free
Second – it’s always fun to create a new lib and see people using it

As we make our living from using open source projects we need to pay back - Lit may be small but we believe it will be useful for some of you out there.

Currently we’ve implemented more crucial features that are absolutely required in a regular usage:

  • WYSIWYG editor (currently jQueryTE)
  • all translations are versioned – check and compare previous versions, synchronize translations across environments or even apps, thanks to build in API
  • as it’s an engine, installation is a no-brainer :)
  • array support is built in so translating i.e. names of months will not be a problem any more
  • once you'll be done with all translations you can export all phrases to plain good old yaml file and turn off the engine

If you'd like to support us - wait no more, help and improve the tool we could all use!
Fork Lit on GitHub

UPDATE! Lit v1.0 for better i18n of your Rails app

Five years since having contributed Lit to the open source community is long enough to get feedback from the GitHub community and our customers. We have spotted some areas for improvement and here we are with Lit v1.0!

The new features of Lit are as follows:

  • automatic cloud translation (using either Google Cloud Translate or Yandex Translate) - recommended for short pieces of text,
  • the 'deleted and visited again' tab enabling you to restore the once removed translation keys whenever they are called in the terminal,
  • the automatic 'completed' status setting for translations,
  • import from and export to .csv files of your app's translation keys.

Lit 1.0 also prevents translations from being deleted after cleaning up Redis while the app is working as well as their unnecessary duplication.




Photo by: Gemma

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