Beware the Chinese percent sign.

Localization problems.

General Problems.

Localizing software is one of the most fundumental problems business faces when going to international market. So many moving parts and headaches: How to organize the translation process? Where to find translators? How not to break application with invalid translation files?

On the one of my projects I am working on we are using Lokalise. This is friendly service which helps us to organize our work related to translations.

I18n. Rails. And mysterious percent sign.

Recently we happily uploaded a portion of our .yml files with translations to Chinese traditional and Chinese simplified. And we faced the following problem: %{value} was not substituted. The whole team racked their brains to find out why I18n interpolation worked in all the languages except Chineese. The following worked well:

I18n.locale ='en'
=> "en"
I18n.t('quest_conditions.stun_percentage', stun_percentage: 22)
=> "Deal at least 22 % of your team disable/stun"

And the next code did not, it was not interpolated:

2.4.0 (main):0 > I18n.locale = 'zh_CN'
=> "zh_CN"
2.4.0 (main):0 > I18n.t('quest_conditions.stun_percentage', stun_percentage: 22)
=> "造成全队至少％{stun_percentage}的眩晕"

And the problem was that the Chinese people use nearly the same percent sign. If you look closer you will event notice the difference:

'%'.ord
=> 37
'％'.ord
=> 65285

Always double check you translators work.

Happy Coding!