title: How do you customize transliterations in a Rails 3 app?
body: <p>Ultimately, I would like to use Inflector.parameterize to create slugs for article heading that have a bunch of unicode chars in them (e.g. "ḤellẒ no" => "hellz-no"). According to <a href="http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector.html#method-i-transliterate" rel="nofollow">http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActiveSupport/Inflector.html#method-i-transliterate</a> it says to put them in the locales/en.yml file.</p>
  
  <pre><code># Store the transliterations in locales/en.yml
  i18n:
    transliterate:
      rule:
        Ḥ: "h"
        Ẓ: "z"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I tried that but the following does not work:</p>
  
  <pre><code>"ḤellẒ no".parameterize
  # =&gt; "ell-no"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However, when I change it in Ruby like the second paragraph suggests, it works.</p>
  
  <pre><code>I18n.backend.store_translations(:en, :i18n =&gt; {
     :transliterate =&gt; {
       :rule =&gt; {
         "Ḥ" =&gt; "H",
         "Ẓ" =&gt; "Z"
       }
     }
  })
  
  "ḤellẒ no".parameterize
  # =&gt; "hellz-no"
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I guess I would like to know why putting the custom transliterations in locales/en.yml doesn't work.</p>
  
  <p>And even if someone give the answer for that, being a Rails noob, I would also like to know where one usually puts code like the second block to manually set the I18n.backend.store_translations?</p>