i18n

Internationalization

Intro

In our project, we decided enable internationalization support in our backend. Right now, we support Dutch and English.

The default language is Dutch. If you want English, include Accept-Language: en in your request header.

Default Django error messages are automatically translated. If you write your own error messages, use _(<error-message>) syntax. Where _() is imported with from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _.

Note of caution: At the time of writing this, there seem to be problems with f-strings. Sadly, you'll have to use the old and bulky format instead.

Example:
_("{param} does not exist").format(param=param) instead of _(f"{param} does not exist").

In our, project, we program in English. So in our code, we write all error messages in English. We provide a translation to Dutch for all of these error messages. That way we have a solid bilingual support by only caring about one-way translations.

Add your own translations

When you wrote custom error messages that you wish to translate, run django-admin makemessages --all --ignore=env to add them to the *.po files in backend/locale/.

Now, take a look at the *.po message files:

• msgid represents the translation string as it appears in the source code.
• msgstr represents the language translation which you'll have to type yourself. It is empty by default, meaning there won't be a translation unless you explicitly give one.

After adding the translations, compile them by running django-admin compilemessages --ignore=env, which will update the *.mo files.

TL;DR

• _()
  • from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _
• django-admin makemessages --all --ignore=env
• django-admin compilemessages --ignore=env