Just a quick tip I’ve come across while browsing through the comments on a Railscast_I’ve_been_watching. It looks like the I18n gems that get automatically installed with Rails 3 have a teensy bug. When storing a translation to the backend (be it YAML, Redis, whatever), there is an :escape option that can be passed to enable (or prevent) the key from containing the dot character (.) (Among others, I’m sure). This seems to work fine when dealing with a single backend, but unfortunately when you are using chained backends (For example I am using Redis preferentially, but falling back on YAML when necessary), the options hash that you would pass the :escape option in is mistakenly initialized to an empty hash. It’s a simple fix - there is already a closed pull request on the issue here. It looks like the latest stable version is only 0.50 though, so the fix isn’t going to filter through to the actual gem just yet. For now, the best option is probably to class_eval into that particular section, or just change the file yourself.