{% trans "string" %} not working on templates but {% trans variable %} does

Question

I'm quite new to Django and I'm working on a project with i18n, the thing is that I have translated some variables using .manage.py makemessages / compilemessages on my template file, but when I use {% trans "my string" %} I got the same "my string" for all the languages.

What am I doing wrong? Here's the code for the views.py and the idioma.html

---

views.py:

#some code here...

def idioma(request):
    output = _("Mensaje en espanol")
    return render_to_response( 'idioma/idioma.html', { 'idioma' : output }, context_instance = RequestContext(request) )

---

idioma.html

{% load i18n %}

< form action="/i18n/setlang/" method="post">

        {% csrf_token %}

        < input name="next" type="hidden" value="{{ redirect_to }}" />

        < select name="language" >

        {% get_language_info_list for LANGUAGES as languages %}

        {% for language in languages %}

            < option value="{{ language.code }}">
                {{ language.name_local }} ({{ language.code }})
            < /option>
        {% endfor %}

        </select>

        < input type="submit" value="Go" />

    < /form>

    La cadena es: {% trans idioma  %}

    {% trans "carro" %}

---

The application translates the idioma variable from the .po and .mo files in locale/path/to/language/

But it doesn't translate the {% trans "carro" %} string.

What's going on?

Thanks for your help!!!!

Answer 1

Have you manually translated the string in the .po ?

makemessages just adds "carro" to the .po, generating something like this in the .po file

#: idioma.html:45
msgid "carro"
msgstr ""

and then you have to edit the .po manually adding the translation for that string, in this way:

#: idioma.html:45
msgid "carro"
msgstr "car"

Then, when you are done translating all the .po strings, you can run compilemessages: it will compile your translations.

Note: always remember to look for ,fuzzy translations. If you have something like this in your .po

#: idioma.html:45
#, fuzzy
msgid "carro"
msgstr "car"

That means that django, for some reason, tried to translate the string by itself (it usually happens when you already used that string in a piece of code that you aren't using anymore).

You have to review the translation and delete the #, fuzzy line: any translation tagged with #, fuzzy won't be translated in your pages.

Answer 2

I ran into a similar problem and was able to resolve it by setting LOCALE_PATHS in my settings file. LOCALE_PATHS is a tuple of directory paths where django looks for .mo and .po files. Here's an example:

# settings.py
LOCALE_PATHS = (
    '/path/to/your/project/locale',
)

Read django's official documentation on LOCALE_PATHS for more information.