Finding missing translations in django `.po` files

Question

Working with Django, you can use django.utils.translation.ugettext and ....ugettext_lazy (as well as some template tags) to handle translation of localized messages.

Later, with command: django-admin.py makemessages -l <LANGUAGE> you can generate the po file containing the original string, so that the developer can specify the desired translation.

Question: is there a django command, or any other quick way, to find out which messages have not been translated?

Usually I look for the string msgstr "" in the po file, but that's inaccurate, since some translations are multiline, like the following:

#file.py:xyz
msgid ""
"Some very long text"
msgstr ""
"The translation of some very long text"

Thus, looking for msgstr "" I get "false positives" (i.e. strings that are actually translated, but whose translation start the next line). With thousand of lines, this quite often.

Any smart suggestion?

Thanks

Answer 1

Assuming you are using some popular editors:

• in most editors, simply search msgstr ""\n\n
• under windows / with notepad, maybe you will need something like msgstr ""\r\n\r\n
• you could also try some specialized editors, check this
• ultimatively, you could do the following: sed -i '/msgstr ""/{N;N; s/\n\n/\n# translate me!\n\n/g}' django.po and then search for # translate me! comments in the file.

Answer 2

You can use

msgfmt --statistics --output=/dev/null locale/django.po

to see how many missing translations there are (if any), and

msgattrib --untranslated locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/django.po

to list the untranslated messages.

Answer 3

The easiest way to check for missing translations, and other errors, would be to use the "msgcmp" utility. It's actually supposed to be used to compare a translations file (.po) against a template (.pot), but it's perfectly happy to compare a .po file against itself:

msgcmp path/to/nl.po path/to/nl.po

will do the trick, and even fail if any translations are marked as fuzzy (unless you specify --use-fuzzy).