Question

I have a reasonably simple Django (1.1) site where i need some basic interface and other texts to be translated between two languages. I’ve created the po files using manage.py makemessages, translated them (using poedit), and compiled the mo files using manage.py compilemessages as outlined in the i18n docs for Django.

But the problem is; most strings still show up in the original language…

• i checked that the po files actually contain all strings
• i checked that the mo files were freshly generated after the last translation effort
• the language does actually change when i switch using the getlang() method
• a few strings -do- end up being translated when i switch
• but most don’t…

Not really sure where else to look… Is there any app that i can use to check whether the compiled mo files are valid & complete for instance? Could these strings be cached? (i’m not using any caching middleware)

Answer 1

Found it!! While pulling out hair trying to figure out what was causing my woes i commented out django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware from my MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES and refreshed the page in an attempt to try everything. Obviously that just turned off translation all together but when i turned it back on again, all my fine translated strings were showing up as they should have been all along.

So i’m guessing something, somewhere get’s compiled/cached when you turn on the locale middleware and the only way to refresh it is to turn it off and on. Restarting the server didn’t help so this a bit counter intuitive, but who cares it works! 🙂