Here we go again for another post of this blog’s irregular column, entitled Django’s Friday Tips. Today let’s address a silent issue, that any of you that have formerly worked with internationalization (i18n) almost certainly already faced.
You add a string that must be translated:
from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _
some_variable = _("A key that needs translation")You then execute the manage.py makemessages --locale pt command, go to the generated django.po file and edit the translation:
msgid "A key that needs translation"
msgstr "Uma chave que precisa de tradução"You compile (manage.py compilemessages --locale pt), and proceed with your work.
A few moments later, when checking the results of your hard effort… nothing, the text is showing the key (in English).
Time to double-check the code (did I forgot the gettext stuff?), the translation file, the I18n settings, etc. What the hell?
Don’t waste any more time, most likely the translation is marked as fuzzy, like this:
#: myapp/module.py:3
#, fuzzy
#| msgid "Another key that needed translation"
msgid "A key that needs translation"
msgstr "Uma chave que precisa de tradução"You see, you didn’t notice that #, fuzzy line and kept it there. The command that compiles those translations ignores the messages marked as fuzzy.
So the solution is to remove those extra 2 lines, or to compile with the --use-fuzzy flag. That’s it, compile, and you should be able to proceed with the problem solved.
