multilingual - Django site with 2 languages

Question

I want to develop a site with 2 languages, a default one, my native language and an optional English. I plan to have my domains as such:

www.mydomain.com/tr/
www.mydomain.com/en/

By default, once a user enter mydomain.com. they will be redirected to /tr/ version and select to go to the /en/ if they want via a top menu. And here is my question.

What is the best Django way to maintain both languages, please note that I don't want automatic translation but I want to maintain texts for both languages myself.

Thanks

Answer 1

So here is the long version to your question. Tested on Django 1.4 thru 1.7.1:

In settings.py …

Add to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES, locale, it enables language selection based on request:

'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',

Add LOCALE_PATHS, this is where your translation files will be stored:

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

Enable i18N

USE_I18N = True

Set LANGUAGES that you will be translating the site to:

ugettext = lambda s: s
LANGUAGES = (
    ('en', ugettext('English')),
    ('pl', ugettext('Polish')),
)

Add i18n template context processor, requests will now include LANGUAGES and LANGUAGE_CODE:

For Django <1.8 put it here:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    ....
    'django.core.context_processors.i18n', # this one
)

For Django >= 1.8 put it here:

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'OPTIONS':
            {'context_processors': [
                'django.template.context_processors.i18n',  # this one
            ]}
    }
]

Nest, in urls.py :

In url_patterns, add the below, it will enable the set language redirect view:

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

See Miscellaneous in Translations for more on this.

Add the following imports, and encapsulate the urls you want translated with i18n_patterns. Here is what mine looks like:

from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
)

urlpatterns += i18n_patterns('',
    (_(r'^dual-lang/'), include('duallang.urls')),
    (r'^', include('home.urls')),
)

Note: You can also drop your admin urls into the i18n_patterns.

Wrap your text with lazytext! import lazytext (as above) and wrap every string with it like so _('text'), you can even go to your other urls.py files and do url translation like so:

url(_(r'^dual_language/$'), landing, name='duallang_landing'),

You can wrap text that you want translated in your other files, such as models.py, views.py etc.. Here is an example model field with translations for label and help_text:

name = models.CharField(_('name'), max_length=255, unique=True, help_text=_("Name of the FAQ Topic"))

Django translation docs are great for this!

In your html templates...

Now you can go into your templates and load the i18n templatetag and use trans and transblock on the static stuff you want to translate. Here is an example:

{% load i18n %}

{% trans "This is a translation" %}<br><br>
{% blocktrans with book_t='book title'|title author_t='an author'|title %}
This is {{ book_t }} by {{ author_t }}. Block trans is powerful!
{% endblocktrans %}

Now run a makemessages for each of your locales:

./manage.py makemessages -l pl

And now all is left is to go into your /locales folder, and edit each of the .po files. Fill in the data for each msgstr. Here is one such example of that:

msgid "English"
msgstr "Angielski"

And finally compile the messages:

./manage.py compilemessages

There is a lot more to learn with translations and internationalization is closely related to this topic, so check out the docs for it too. I also recommend checking out some of the internationalization packages available for Django like django-rosetta, and django-linguo. They help translate model content, django-rosetta does not create new entries for this in your database, while django-linguo does.

I also created a django translation demo for those interested to look at a full working solution.

If you followed this you should be off to a good start. I believe this is the most standardized way to get your site running in multiple languages. Cheers!