Django i18n: Common causes for translations not appearing

Question

I am making a multilingual Django website. I created a messages file, populated and compiled it. I checked the site (the admin in this case,) in my wanted language (Hebrew)

Answer 1

I'm trying to provide a complete check list:

• In settings.py, are USE_I18N, USE_L10N, LANGUAGE_CODE, and LOCALE_PATHS set properly?

  • See this list for all allowed values of language identifiers. Note that Simplified Chinese is specified by zh-hans, not zh-cn.

• In settings.py, is django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware included in MIDDLEWARE in correct order?

• Have you (re)run django-admin makemessages -l with the correct local name, from the correct place?

  • You can see an incomplete list of allowed locale name by running ls your/path/to/python/site-packages/django/conf/locale/ on your machine, or by taking a look at the source code
  • Note that you have to use _ rather than - here. For example, to specify simplified Chinese, execute django-admin makemessages -l zh_Hans, not zh_CN or zh_hans or zh-Hans or anything else.

• Have you removed all fuzzy tags in your PO file(s)?

• Have you (re)compiled the OP file(s) with django-admin compilemessages?

• Have you restarted the web server?

Additional notes:

• If some of your translation is overridden by Django's default translation, use contextual markers to bypass it. For example,

models.py

first_name = models.CharField(
    pgettext_lazy('override default', 'first name'),
    max_length=30
)

last_name = models.CharField(
    pgettext_lazy('override default', 'last name'),
    max_length=150
)

django.po

#: models.py:51
msgctxt "override default"
msgid "first name"
msgstr "姓"

#: models.py:55
msgctxt "override default"
msgid "last name"
msgstr "名"

and you'll see 姓, 名 instead of the default 姓氏, 名字.