Question

I have seen more than one hundred posts about i18n issues and no solution seems to solve my problem.

I have an app running with Django 1.3.1 and it works Fine at my develop machine. But when I bring to heroku nothing happens. The files are not translated at all. It seems that the locale folder in my project is not being found.

Locale folder is at my project level and this is my settings:

BASE_PATH = os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(__file__))

LANGUAGE_CODE = 'pt-br'

USE_I18N = True

USE_L10N = True

ugettext = lambda s: s
LANGUAGES = (
    ('en-us', ugettext('English')),
    ('pt-br', ugettext('Portuguese')),
)

LOCALE_PATHS = (
       os.path.join(BASE_PATH, "locale"),
)

Locale folder follows this structure:

locale
    pt_BR
        LC_MESAGES
            django.mo
            django.po

Answer 1

In the sample above you wrote LC_MESAGES instead of LC_MESSAGES (notice the double S), I believe this very well could be your issue.

If not then read on!

I had this issue (again!) recently, and the answer was found in this part of the django documentation

I suspect you have the same issue since your “admin” app was translated but not your own (project) app.

It seems that Django is looking for your translations like so:

1. The directories listed in LOCALE_PATHS have the highest precedence,
   with the ones appearing first having higher precedence than the ones
   appearing later.
2. Then, it looks for and uses if it exists a locale
   directory in each of the installed apps listed in INSTALLED_APPS. The
   ones appearing first have higher precedence than the ones appearing
   later.
3. Finally, the Django-provided base translation in
   django/conf/locale is used as a fallback.

With the settings you described above, you must make sure your tree looks something like this (with the most important being settings.py is in the dir above the ‘locale’ dir):

+-project_top/
  |
  +-project_app/
  | |
  | +-locale/
  | | |
  | | +-pt_BR/
  | |   |
  | |   +-LC_MESSAGES/
  | |     |
  | |     +-django.po
  | |  
  | +-settings.py
  |
  +-manage.py