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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-26T12:17:46+00:00

When localising Django application the makemessages command simply parses all the TXT, HTML and

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When localising Django application the makemessages command simply parses all the TXT, HTML and PY files and generates PO files for them but when localising JS files, you need to run the djangojs command. I haven’t delved into the Django source to figure out why this done differently. Could someone explain?

I’ve read that in production environments, Apache is used to serve the application files while a simple proxy like Nginx is used to serve static files as this greatly reduces the load on the application server. With this scenario, I guess it works like this: when rendering a template, Django checks the requested locale, loads the appropriate localisation file and serves the template but JS on the other hand being served as static media doesn’t get parsed by Django. Is this it?

(Its my first foray in to the world of localisation with Django and I’m packed full of question, many of who’s answers I can’t seem to find and therefore this post.)

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The reason why it’s handled differently is in the docs.

    Adding translations to JavaScript poses some problems:

    • JavaScript code doesn’t have access to a gettext implementation.
    • JavaScript code doesn’t have access to .po or .mo files; they need to be delivered by the server.
    • The translation catalogs for JavaScript should be kept as small as possible.

    So essentially, the internal Python translation is done on the server. But for JS, there’s another file served by the server, which contains all the required translations for user’s language. And the translation is done on the user’s side. So as you can see, it’s a completely different strategy. Django helps by adding similar interface for JS files, even though they’re handled in a completely different way.

    I guess it works like this: when rendering a template, Django checks
    the requested locale, loads the appropriate localisation file and
    serves the template but JS on the other hand being served as static
    media doesn’t get parsed by Django. Is this it?

    You are right in the first part, about handling templates. Handling JS works as I’ve explained above.

    Note that Django JS translation mechanism, doesn’t treat JS translations as static files. It uses a Django view to generate the JS file everytime (javascript_catalog mentioned in the docs linked in the first line).
    That is one of the problems I’ve encountered. Such files don’t need to be generated on every request. There are some projects that actually let you pack those JS translations as static files and enable you to cache them properly (like django-mediagenerator).

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