Using Translations in Your Own Projects

Django looks for translations by following this algorithm:

• First, it looks for a locale directory in the application directory of the view that’s being called. If it finds a translation for the selected language, the translation will be installed.
• Next, it looks for a locale directory in the project directory. If it finds a translation, the translation will be installed.
• Finally, it checks the base translation in django/conf/locale.

This way, you can write applications that include their own translations, and you can override base translations in your project path. Or, you can just build a big project out of several applications and put all translations into one big project message file. The choice is yours.

Note – If you’re using manually configured settings, the locale directory in the project directory will not be examined, since Django loses the ability to work out the location of the project directory. (Django normally uses the location of the settings file to determine this, and a settings file doesn’t exist if you’re manually configuring your settings.)

All message file repositories are structured the same way:

• $APPPATH/locale/<language>/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)
• $PROJECTPATH/locale/<language>/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)
• All paths listed in LOCALE_PATHS in your settings file are searched in that order for <language>/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)
• $PYTHONPATH/django/conf/locale/<language>/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)

To create message files, you use the same make-messages.py tool as with the Django message files. You only need to be in the right place — in the directory where either the conf/locale (in case of the source tree) or the locale/ (in case of application messages or project messages) directory is located. And you use the same compile-messages.py to produce the binary django.mo files that are used by gettext. Application message files are a bit complicated to discover — they need the LocaleMiddleware. If you don’t use the middleware, only the Django message files and project message files will be processed.

Finally, you should give some thought to the structure of your translation files. If your applications need to be delivered to other users and will be used in other projects, you might want to use application-specific translations. But using application-specific translations and project translations could produce weird problems with make-messages. make-messages will traverse all directories below the current path and so might put message IDs into the project message file that are already in application message files.

The easiest way out is to store applications that are not part of the project (and so carry their own translations) outside the project tree. That way, make-messages on the project level will only translate strings that are connected to your explicit project and not strings that are distributed independently.

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