Django: How to add Chinese support to the application

Question

I am trying to add a Chinese language to my application written in Django and I have a really hard time with that. I have spent half a day trying different approaches, no success.

My application supports few languages, this is part of settings.py file:

TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Dublin'
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'

LOCALES = (
    #English
    ('en', u'English'),

    #Norwegian
    ('no', u'Norsk'),

    #Finish
    ('fi', u'Suomi'),

    #Simplified Chinese
    ('zh-CN', u'简体中文'),

    #Traditional Chinese
    ('zh-TW', u'繁體中文'),

    #Japanese
    ('ja', u'日本語'),
)

At the moment all (but Chinese) languages work perfectly. This is a content of locale directory:

$ ls locale/
en
fi
ja
no
zh_CN
zh_TW

In every directory I have LC_MESSAGES directory with *.mo and *.po files. *.po files are created by script written in Python, which converts *.ODS to a text file. *.mo files are created by python manage.py compilemessages command.

Language can be selected by user from the proper form in "Preferences" section in my application.

Django does not load Chinese translation. That is the problem. Both simplified and traditional does not work. I have tried different variations of language and locale codes in settings.py and in locale directory: zh-CN, zh-cn, zh_CN, zh_cn. No success.

Perhaps I made a simple mistake? I have added Polish language just for test and everything went fine. Basically I did the same. I have added ('pl', u'Polish') tuple to the settings.py and "locale/pl" with *.po and *.mo and LC_MESSAGES directory...

Do you know what might be wrong?

Answer 1

You will need to use lower case for your locale language codes for it to work properly. i.e. use

LANGUAGES = (
    ('zh-cn', u'简体中文'), # instead of 'zh-CN'
    ('zh-tw', u'繁體中文'), # instead of 'zh-TW'
)

See the language codes specified in https://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/conf/global_settings.py. You will see that it uses zh-tw instead of zh-TW.

Finally, the language directories storing the *.po and *.mo files in your locales folder needs to be named zh_CN and zh_TW respectively for the translations to work properly.

Answer 2

For Django 1.7 and up, you'll need to do the following:

zh-hans in your config, and make sure that your directory is named zh_Hans.

And for traditional Chinese:

zh-hant in your config, and your directory should be named zh_Hant.

Here is an example of how the auth contributor package lays out its translations in the locale directory: https://github.com/django/django/tree/master/django/contrib/auth/locale

Basically, for our Chinese language codes, the - is replaced with a _, and the first letter of the second work is capitalized.

Source code for this logic is here: https://github.com/django/django/blob/7a42cfcfdc94c1e7cd653f3140b9eb30492bae4f/django/utils/translation/init.py#L272-L285

and just to be thorough, here is the method:

def to_locale(language, to_lower=False):
    """
    Turns a language name (en-us) into a locale name (en_US). If 'to_lower' is
    True, the last component is lower-cased (en_us).
    """
    p = language.find('-')
    if p >= 0:
        if to_lower:
            return language[:p].lower() + '_' + language[p + 1:].lower()
        else:
            # Get correct locale for sr-latn
            if len(language[p + 1:]) > 2:
                return language[:p].lower() + '_' + language[p + 1].upper() + language[p + 2:].lower()
            return language[:p].lower() + '_' + language[p + 1:].upper()
    else:
return language.lower()

Note that en-us is turned into en_US, based on the source code above, because us is 2 characters or less.

Answer 3

I had the same problem [Django-1.6.1] and solved it by renaming the locale directories for Chinese from zh-cn (or zh_cn) to zh_CN (underscore and uppercase CN).

Strangely enough Django requires a "zh-cn" as LANGUAGE_CODE or url with an i18n_pattern respectively.

Non-documented goodness btw.

Hope that helps.

Answer 4

In .po file, add zh-cn or zh-tw in "Language: \n", which becomes "Language: zh-en\n" or "Language: zh-tw\n"

Compile the messages and runserver again.

Answer 5

Not sure if you were able to resolve this later, but the problem is with the language directory names in the locale directory. This happens with all languages with a dash in their short-code. The solution is to rename the Chinese directories by replacing the dashes with underscores:

zh-cn --> zh_cn
zh-tw --> zh_tw

Hope this helps.