README

Cascading Backend for Ruby i18n
===============================

The Cascading Backend allows for, well, cascaded lookups. This is especially useful if you want to have some general
translations that you only want to override for some locales in more concrete uses.

Example
=======

Say, you have the following structure in your locale file:
  
  :en => {
    :title => 'Title',
    :article => {
      :title => 'Article title'
    },
    :topic => {}
  },
  :de => {
    :title => 'Titel',
    :article => {},
    :topic => {
      :title => 'Thema'
    }
  }

You have some general translation for :title that you usually want to use. The English locale then defines a custom
translation for article titles and the German translation defines one for topic titles.

With the Cascading backend, you get the following results:

  I18n.translate(:title, :locale => :en)            # => "Title"
  I18n.translate(:title, :locale => :de)            # => "Titel"

  I18n.translate(:'article.title', :locale => :en)  # => "Article title"
  I18n.translate(:'article.title', :locale => :de)  # => "Titel"

  I18n.translate(:'topic.title', :locale => :en)    # => "Title"
  I18n.translate(:'topic.title', :locale => :de)    # => "Thema"

If you make use of I18n's :default mechanism, your own defaults take precedence over the cascaded ones:

  I18n.translate(:'topic.title', :default => 'Topic title', :locale => :en)    # => "Topic title"

Feedback
========

Feel free to send me any feedback you might have and also feel free to fork away! ;-)

Copyright (c) 2009 Clemens Kofler <clemens@railway.at>, www.railway.at, released under the MIT license