Learning to be a Djangonaut: Localisation/translation – locale for Chile

Djangonaut

A person who is expert in Django web framework.

He is a Djangonaut dude.

In my pursuit to become a gun djangonaut and get my knowledge of the framework sound and stable I have been following along Marina Mele’s fantastic series “TaskBuster Django Tutorial”. It covers a lot of topics that I am keen to understand and be able to explain one day.

My current goal is to have a django web app that has a Restful API that will allow various types of authentication. On top of this I will create an iOS app that can talk to it.

I had started to follow along with a post that Félix Descôteaux had written titled “A Rest API using Django and authentication with OAuth2 AND third parties!”. As I was getting into it I realised that I had better spend some time get a better basic understanding of Django and some other key concepts of python and web app development I had yet to explore. Geez the internet is just so cool when you want to learn something!

Along the way following Marina’s series I hit a bit trouble getting “Localizations” to work – when a site works across multiple languages. Django seems to have a easy to use mechanism but I was having issues with the locale for Chilean Spanish (I always am really…). 🙂

So in an effort to try to give back a little to the wonderful internet for anyone else who may stumble across this post with the same issue…

Basically:

It was a combination of using “es-CL”, “es_CL” & “es-cl” in various places.

Property	Value
Base locale ID	es-CL
Language	es
Language	Spanish
Country	CL
Country	Chile

In the base.py (settings file):

LANGUAGES = (
('en', _('English')),
('<strong>es-CL</strong>', _('Spanish (Chile)')),
)

Then in the test_all_users.py I used ‘es-cl‘ wherever necessary.

Then in the tb_test virtual env shell:

$ python manage.py makemessages -l es_CL

I edited the django.po with my translated strings.
(I had to laugh when I read the “po” in django.po for this Chilean translation :] )

Then in the tb_test virtual env shell:

$ python manage.py compilemessages -l es_CL

Now I am passing the tests and seeing the translated page in the browser.

I hope that helps someone out one day!