Anything related to i18n/i10n subject seem to be somehow quirkier than it looks at first glance. Python (2.x) itself and handling of unicode is a story apart.
This time I was looking into building a small website that has to provide UI in different languages. As this is one of the things you want to have right away I’ve started experimenting with adding i18n and i10n support.
First step is easy, the settings.py already had proper settings. Then for .py files it is rather straightforward to add e.g. (for forms):
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _
...
city_name = forms.CharField( required = False, label = _('City:'))
For the .html files something like
{% load i18n %}
{% trans "Hello there!" %}
Then create under project folder folder ‘conf/locale’ (if you don’t do this it will complain), and then run
django-admin.py makemessages -l ru
Edit the resulting django.po file, add translations to your messages.
Warning: don’t forget to edit the following field, which comes EMPTY first, even while you have given it a parameter! Otherwise this file will be not used properly.
"Language: ru\n"
Then compile your nice and shiny translations:
django-admin.py compilemessages
Now we get all messages available. At least they should. But there is another trick missed in the Django documentation/tutorials: you HAVE TO specify the location of the message files explicitly in your settings.py otherwise your texts will continue coming up in default (en) language no matter how hard you try. E.g.:
LOCALE_PATHS = (
os.path.join(os.path.dirname(__file__), 'conf', 'locale').replace('\\','/'),
)
Well, after all this it seems to work. But it costs quite some searching and poking around to come to this. I can imagine after several rounds this becomes obvious, but you don’t get any errors, warnings, whatsoever, it just does not what you want it to do. Well, I hope it will do it for you now :).
Happy Djangoing!