[Django]-Django-admin.py makemessages not working

Please try this in Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install gettext

And use brew install gettext in OSX

Also make sure to set the local path in settings.py file.

Here is the solution for those having problems with translations or are creating a multi-language site for the very first time in Django. Here is the way I do it, and I have been doing since Django 1.4, below is tested in 1.7.1:

In settings.py …

Add to MIDDLEWEAR_CLASSES, locale, it enables language selection based on request:

'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',

Add LOCALE_PATHS, this is where your translation files will be stored, also enable i18N:

USE_I18N = True

LOCALE_PATHS = (
    os.path.join(PROJECT_PATH, 'locale/'),
)

Set LANGUAGES that you will be translating the site to:

ugettext = lambda s: s
LANGUAGES = (
    ('en', ugettext('English')),
    ('fr', ugettext('French')),
    ('pl', ugettext('Polish')),
)

Add i18n template context processor, requests will now include LANGUAGES and LANGUAGE_CODE:

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
    'django.core.context_processors.debug',
    'django.core.context_processors.i18n', # this one
    'django.core.context_processors.request',
    'django.core.context_processors.static',
    'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',  
)

Nest, in urls.py :

In url_patterns, add the below, it will enable the set language redirect view:

url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),

See Miscellaneous in Translations for more on this.

Add the following imports, and encapsulate the urls you want translated with i18n_patterns. Here is what mine looks like:

from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns
from django.utils.translation import ugettext_lazy as _

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
)

urlpatterns += i18n_patterns('',
    (_(r'^dual-lang/'), include('duallang.urls')),
    (r'^', include('home.urls')),
)

Note: You can also drop your admin urls into the i18n_patterns.

Now anywhere you use text and want to convert it, import lazytext and wrap every string with it like so _(‘text’), you can even go to your other urls.py files and do url translation like so:

url(_(r'^dual_language/$'), landing, name='duallang_landing'),

You can wrap text that you want translated in your other files, such as models.py, views.py etc.. Here is an example model field with translations for label and help_text:

name = models.CharField(_('name'), max_length=255, unique=True, help_text=_("Name of the FAQ Topic"))

Django translation docs are great for this!

In your html templates…

Now you can go into your templates and load the i18n templatetag and use trans and transblock on the static stuff you want to translate. Here is an example:

{% load i18n %}

{% trans "This is a translation" %}<br><br>
{% blocktrans with book_t='book title'|title author_t='an author'|title %}
This is {{ book_t }} by {{ author_t }}. Block trans is powerful!
{% endblocktrans %}

Now run a makemessages for each of your locales:

./manage.py makemessages -l pl

And now all is left is to go into your /locales folder, and edit each of the .po files. Fill in the data for each msgstr. Here is one such example of that:

msgid "English"
msgstr "Angielski"

And finally compile the messages:

./manage.py compilemessages

There is a lot more to learn with translations and internationalization is closely related to this topic, so check out the docs for it too. I also recommend checking out some of the internationalization packages available for Django like django-rosetta, and django-linguo. They help translate model content, django-rosetta does not create new entries for this in your database, while django-linguo does.

If you followed this you should be off to a good start. I believe this is the most standardized way to get your site running in multiple languages. Cheers!

For Mac users brew link gettext --force can be risk, as Brew advises. A better work around is to set a new PATH variable for your virtual environment. So, in the postactivate file, which is located in the bin folder of your virtual environment folder, type:

export TEMP_PATH=$PATH
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/0.19.7/bin

Note that you have to replace 0.19.7 by the version that is installed in your machine.

And in your predeactivate file, which is located in the same folder of postactivate file, type:

export PATH=$TEMP_PATH
unset TEMP_PATH

Now you can use the python manage.py makemessages -l <desired_language> without worries. 🙂

Cheers.

For macOS :

brew install gettext
export PATH="/usr/local/opt/gettext/bin:$PATH"


Have you added {% load i18n %} to the top of your template?

Bonus: You don’t need to link gettext, what is the output from brew doctor?

Please install gettext in your ubuntu OS
using sudo apt-get command

Or in Mac

using brew command

If you don’t want to link gettext (which you shouldn’t because messing about with OS X internals is bad) then you can set the PATH for the makemessages command. The following should work (but you need to adjust your gettext version number):

PATH=/usr/local/Cellar/gettext/<installed version>/bin/:$PATH && \
django-admin makemessages -l <language>

If you do it that way your installed gettext remains keg-only and django-admin will be happy and find all the programms it needs.

One of the possibilities is that after you have successfully done all the above and done

pip install python-gettext

you may have improperly configured your IDE or venv. In order to bypass this, go to the command prompt, navigate to your root folder and run py manage.py makemessages from there. It will work.

For me, on Windows 10, the problem was that I used gettext installed with pip install (I got version 0.19-something). I made it work by:

1. Uninstalling gettext with pip.
2. downloading gettext (as a zip) from here istead: https://mlocati.github.io/articles/gettext-iconv-windows.html
3. Extracting the files in a foler on "C:/program files"
4. Added the path to the "bin" folder (inside the extracted folder) to PATH in my environment variables in windows.

After that it worked! (after 5 h frustrated debugging…)