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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-09T04:27:28+00:00

I followed the whole documentation about text translation, but django doesn’t take my .mo

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I followed the whole documentation about text translation, but django doesn’t take my .mo file into account.

Some facts:

  • I created a conf/locale/ folder at the root of my project
  • django.po was generated successfully with django-admin.py makemessages -l fr
  • django.mo was generated successfully with django-admin.py compilemessages

So my folder structure is:

project/
  site/
  locale/
    fr/
      LC_MESSAGES/
        django.mo
        django.po
  • In settings.py, I have set LANGUAGE_CODE = 'fr'
  • My browser correctly sends Accept-Language:fr-FR,fr;
  • request.LANGUAGE_CODE shows fr from my views

But I get nothing translated… How to make django take these files into account ?

Edit

Adding /home/www/project/locale to settings.LOCALE_PATHS works. However, Django should find this path by itself, and I don’t like using absolute paths. What happens here ?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    LOCALE_PATHS

    Django looks for translation files in 3 locations by default:

    • LOCALE_PATHS/(language)/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)
    • $APPPATH/locale/(language)/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)
    • $PYTHONPATH/django/conf/locale/(language)/LC_MESSAGES/django.(po|mo)

    LOCALE_PATHS only need to be used if your translation files aren’t in your app directories or on the PYTHON_PATH.

    An example of LOCALE_PATHS in settings.py

    LOCALE_PATHS = (
    '/home/www/project/conf/locale', # replace with correct path here
)

    MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES

    Add django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in settings.py

    LANGUAGES

    LANGUAGES = (
    ('fr', 'Français'),
)
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