Question

I need to internationalize and translate python application. I look forward for some dictionary collection resides in additional resource files that could be switched runtime and used smoothly inside python code.

I’ve searched stackoverflow.com for similar tools but find only platform-specific libraries, e.g. for pylons, for django and so on.

Is there any general ready for use library?

Answer 1

Babel provides such tools:

A collection of tools for internationalizing Python applications

Babel is composed of two major parts:

• tools to build and work with gettext message catalogs
• a Python interface to the CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), providing access to various locale display names, localized number and date formatting, etc.

So it helps you translate strings and provide localized float, currency, dates and other information based on a current locale:

>>> locale = Locale('es')
>>> month_names = locale.months['format']['wide'].items()
>>> month_names.sort()
>>> for idx, name in month_names:
...     print name
enero
febrero
marzo
abril
mayo
junio
julio
agosto
septiembre
octubre
noviembre
diciembre
>>> format_decimal(1.2345, locale='en_US')
u'1.234'
>>> format_decimal(1.2345, locale='sv_SE')
u'1,234'
>>> format_decimal(12345, locale='de_DE')
u'12.345'

It builds on top of the default gettext library to do translations, giving you tools to extract messages from a variety of source files (python, templates, etc), including a plugin-system for other packages to provide additional extractors.