“Make it work” means shipping something that doesn’t break. The code might be ugly and difficult to understand, but we’re delivering value to the customer and we have tests that give us confidence. Without tests, it’s hard to answer “Does this work?”

For several reasons the Simple backend shipped with Active Support only does the "simplest thing that could possibly work" for Ruby on Rails3 ... which means that it is only guaranteed to work for English and, as a side effect, languages that are very similar to English. Also, the simple backend is only capable of reading translations but cannot dynamically store them to any format.That does not mean you're stuck with these limitations, though. The Ruby I18n gem makes it very easy to exchange the Simple backend implementation with something else that fits better for your needs, by passing a backend instance to the I18n.backend= setter.