Django: default language i18n

Question

I have a website that is written in dutch. Now I have to provide a second language for that website which is french.

So I surrounded all text that needs to be translated with the gettext function, created the po files and compiled those to mo files. I also created a view that sets the django_language session to the appropriate language code. So now the french version is working but I can't switch back to the dutch version.

So I was wondering do I need to create a po/mo file for the dutch version also? The text that's being past to gettext is already in dutch. Is there a way to say use the 'default text'?

This is the view I use to add the language code to my session:

class LanguagePickerView(RedirectView):
    url = '/'

    def get(self,request,*args, **kwargs):
        request.session['django_language'] = self.kwargs.get('language')
        return super(LanguagePickerView, self).get(request, args, kwargs)

In my templates I use the following urls:

<a href='{% url web-language 'nl-nl' %}'>NL</a>
<a href='{% url web-language 'fr' %}'>fr</a>

Answer 1

Default language strings are not stored in po/mo files, they go directly in code and templates - seems that you have this right.

You can switch back to it, by setting the session variable django_language back to dutch.

Ensure, that you have your settings set the right way:

LANGUAGE_CODE = 'nl' #default language

LANGUAGES = (
  ('nl', _('Dutch')),
  ('fr', _('French')),
)

Don't forget, that you don't have to write code to switch between languages by your self. Better to use special django view (quote from django book):

As a convenience, Django comes with a view, django.views.i18n.set_language, that sets a user’s language preference and redirects back to the previous page.

Activate this view by adding the following line to your URLconf:

(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),