How to create an internationalized Google App Engine application

Question

I would like to provide my Python GAE website in the user\'s own language, using only the tools available directly in App Engine. For that, I would like to use GNU gettext

Answer 1

As my needs were simple, I used a simple hack instead of (unavailable) gettext. I created a file with string translations, translate.py. Approximately like this:

en={}
ru={}

en['default_site_title']=u"Site title in English"
ru['default_site_title']=u"Название сайта по-русски"

Then in the main code I defined a function which returns a dictionary with translations into the most suitable language from the list (the first one to have a translation is used or English):

import translate

def get_messages(languages=[]):
    msgs=translate.en
    for lang in languages:
        if hasattr(translate,lang):
            msgs=getattr(translate,lang)
            break
    return msgs

Usage:

msgs = get_messages(["it","ru","en"])
hi = msgs['hello_message'] % 'yourname'

I also defined a helper function which extracts a list of languages from Accept-Language header.

It's not the most flexible solution, but it doesn't have any external dependencies and works for me (in a toy project). I think translate.py may be generated automatically from gettext files.

In case you want to see more, my actual source is here.