Django internationalization minimal example

Question

I'm having difficulty in internationalizing my app, so I present here a minimal example where my implementation fails.

Consider the following steps for producing a website in django with international support:

go to your favorite folder in the terminal and:

django-admin.py startproject mysite
cd mysite/
mkdir locale
python manage.py startapp main
# (1) modify mysite/urls.py
# (2) modify main/views.py
# (3) modify mysite/settings.py
django-admin.py makemessages -l de
# (4) modify locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/django.po
django-admin.py compilemessages -l de
python manage.py runserver

where:

## (1) mysite/urls.py
urlpatterns = patterns('',
url(r'^$', 'main.views.home'),
)

## (2) main/views.py
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _

def home(request):
    return HttpResponse(_('Hello'))

## (3) mysite/settings.py
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'de'

from django.conf import global_settings
TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = global_settings.TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS + \
     ('django.core.context_processors.i18n',) # ensures all django processors are used.

## (4) locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/django.po
#: main/views.py:6
msgid "Hello"
msgstr "Hallo"

I assume the website has one and only one language, thus, I didn't activated the middleware locale by django documentation:

If you want to let each individual user specify which language he or she prefers, use LocaleMiddleware. LocaleMiddleware enables language selection based on data from the request. It customizes content for each user.

This implementation does not produce the desired translation of "Hello" to "Hallo". What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Django collects translations in these 3 ways explained here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/translation/#how-django-discovers-translations

The directories listed in LOCALE_PATHS have the highest precedence, with the ones appearing first having higher precedence than the ones appearing later.

Then, it looks for and uses if it exists a locale directory in each of the installed apps listed in INSTALLED_APPS. The ones appearing first have higher precedence than the ones appearing later.

Finally, the Django-provided base translation in django/conf/locale is used as a fallback.

Since your translation file is in none of these places you need to set it manually using LOCALE_PATHS as explained here: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/settings/#std:setting-LOCALE_PATHS

Answer 2

1º Enable Internationalization in settings.py:

USE_I18N = True

2º On settings, import:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

3º Set the languages that you are going to use in settings.py:

LANGUAGES = (
    ('en', _('English')),
    ('pt-br', _('Portuguese')),
    ('it', _('Italian')),
    ('fr', _('French')),
    ('es', _('Spanish')),
)

3º Configure the LOCALE_PATH in settings.py too:

LOCALE_PATHS = (
    os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'conf/locale'),
)

4º Inside the path you configured in LOCALE_PATH create the folders, ex:

$ cd django_project_folder
$ mkdir conf
$ mkdir conf/locale

5º Run the command:

django-admin.py makemessages -a

It will create a file .po inside a subfolder of each language set in settings.py LANGUAGES. Make the translations of each sentence inside the file.

Ps: Runs over the entire source tree of the current directory and pulls out all strings marked for translation.

For test, before run, put the tag

{% trans "Welcome to my project!" %} 

inside your index.html and run the command makemessages again. You'll see inside de .po files a new string:

msgid "Welcome to my Project"
msgstr ""

6º Now, run the command:

django-admin compilemessages

It will collect all msgstr from .po file and will compile in a .mo file

7º Run the project and test

8ª Plus: If you want that in URL show what language the user is using you can configure your url.py to show that:

urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
    # your urls here,
)