jekyll site variable in layout

[Stephen Burke]

I'm having trouble using a site variable in my layout.  Here's the contents of my files.  Any help would be appreciated.  

_config.yml 

translations:
  en:
    home:  "Home"

In an aside called latest_docs.html.  Another question is do I put the yaml front matter on these layout html files? 

<li><a rel="index" href="{{ root_url }}/docs/gde-quickstart.html">{{ page.lang }} {{ site.translations[page.lang].home }}</a></li>

For each of my pages I declare the page.lang variable and I do see that get rendered from the layout files.  But the site.translations variable I'm not able to use.

Any thoughts?