I18n exception when error contains two dots

I don't use I18n in this project but it generated an exception in my code because two dots (..) happened to be in an error message, see this code:

def validate
   name="test..test"
   errors.add(:name,"cannot be #{name}")
end

@person.save!
# =>  interning empty string
 /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/activesupport-2.3.5/lib/active_support/vendor/i18n-0.1.3/lib/i18n.rb:196:in `to_sym'

This happens in the code that generates the error message for the exception, so @person.save will work, but @person.save! will not. This can trip up people who use user generated text in their error messages.