Translate placeholder in Django form

Question

I'm having issues translating the placeholder text of a text input field. I have translated my .po file with a translation of the placeholder, and when I load my page all translations work fine, except this single placeholder. And yes I have compiled my translation file.

It seems like it doesn't understand that it should display the translated version. Maybe the form is created without the context of knowing what the current language is.

How to fix this? How to translate placeholders in form widgets in Django?

This is my forms.py file:

from django import forms
from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _

class InlineSearch(forms.Form):
    query = forms.CharField(widget=forms.TextInput(attrs={'class':'form-control input-lg', 'placeholder':_('Search for a country, city or address here...')}), localize=True    )

This is my template .html file:

{% load i18n %}
<div class="inline-search">
    <div class="container">
        <form method="get" action="">
            <div class="input-group">
                {% for field in formset %}
                    {{field}}
                {% endfor %}
                <span class="input-group-btn">
                    <button type="submit" action="submit" class="btn btn-primary btn-lg"><i class="fa fa-search"></i> {% trans "Search" %}</button>
                </span>
            </div>
        </form>
    </div>
</div>

This is my .po file:

#: .\search\forms.py:5
msgid "Search for a country, city or address here..."
msgstr "Sök ett land, stad eller adress här..."

Answer 1

Try to use ugettext_lazy:

from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

instead of

from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _

from the documentation (see bolds):

These functions store a lazy reference to the string – not the actual translation. The translation itself will be done when the string is used in a string context, such as in template rendering.

This is essential when calls to these functions are located in code paths that are executed at module load time.

This is something that can easily happen when defining models, forms and model forms, because Django implements these such that their fields are actually class-level attributes. For that reason, make sure to use lazy translations in the following cases: