Tried to replicate your problem and had the same problem. Moved the pluralization rule to the locale file and worked fine.
I switched the locale file to the Ruby style, because regular YAML for some reason did not like my lambda.
I18n::Backend::Simple.send(:include, I18n::Backend::Pluralization)
{
:ru => {
:user => {
:one => "One User",
:few => "Few Users",
:many => "Many Users",
:other => "Other Users"
},
:i18n => {
:plural => {
:rule => lambda { |n| :few }
}
}
}
}
$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.3.8)
>> I18n.locale = :ru; I18n.t("user", :count => 20)
,