When you refer to one shared model from a handful of other models, sometimes you need to give the shared model's attributes different user-facing names since they are being used in a different context. Unfortunately the documentation for using Rails' built-in localization does not indicate how to accomplish this feat.

Fear not, there is a way!

If you can look past a contrived example, let's say you've got models for Organization and Customer, and each of them refer to a ContactInfo. The unnested way to use Rails i18n would be something like this:

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en:
  activerecord:
    attributes:
      contact_info:
        phone: Phone number

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ContactInfo.human_attribute_name("phone") # => "Phone number"

To show different strings for Organization and Customer, the yaml syntax has a slight twist - rather than nesting contact_info inside of organization or naming they key organization.contact_info the nested attribute should be separated with a / character.

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en:
  activerecord:
    attributes:
      organization/contact_info:
        phone: Customer service number
      customer/contact_info:
        phone: Phone number

Despite the yaml syntax, the new call for a nested attribute with human_attribute_name is dot-separated. Feels a little weird since the yaml uses slashes, but there you have it.

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Organization.human_attribute_name("contact_info.phone") # => Customer service number
Customer.human_attribute_name("contact_info.phone") # => Phone number

I had a hard time tracking down this syntax through the documentation or google, and it appears that this worked differently pre-3.2. This seems like it would be a good candidate for a Rails documentation contribution.