I just reduced the housework needed to setup a new Rails application with i18n. All new applications will ship with a config/locales directory that’s automatically wired up in the load path for i18n. So you can just drop .yml or .rb locale files in there and they’ll be instantly available for translation.

There’s also a sample config/locales/en.yml file in there to give you a starting point. In addition, the initializer is now wired up through the Rails config. The new default environment.rb provides these pointers:

# The internationalization framework can be changed 
# to have another default locale (standard is :en) or more load paths.
# All files from config/locales/*.rb,yml are added automatically.
# config.i18n.load_path << Dir[File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'my', 'locales', '*.{rb,yml}')]
# config.i18n.default_locale = :de

So on a fresh Rails 2.2 application, you’ll be able to do see it all wired up out of the box (the :hello key is from the config/locales/en.yml demo file):

$ ./script/console
>> I18n.t :hello
=> "Hello world"

Rails 2.2 final is just around the corner. We’ve been ironing out the last bugs and added the last amount of polish to make this a kick ass release. Also, work on 2.3 / 3.0 has already begun in master as well since we’ve branched for 2.2 a while back.