Ruby has no support for locales (the mechanics of substituting currency. number and date formatting in system function calls).
However, there is an old Ruby module that you can try – it overrides Ruby’s built-in Time formatting with locale support.
First go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/ruby-locale/ and download the source.
Then build it
ruby extconf.rb
make
sudo make install
If you get build errors on undefined constants (for example on Mac OS X) you should uncomment the constants that your OS doesn’t provide. OS X. for instance, doesn’t provide numeric formatting and currencies – so you can freely comment out lines 196 to 201 in locale.c
After it is built and installed you can use it like that:
require 'locale'
Locale.setlocale(Locale::LC_ALL, "ru_RU.UTF-8")
puts Time.now
This will give you a short formatted Russian date.
You could also have a look at Globalize
category: Howto