Translation

As our huge project progresses we need to start thinking about some of the major features that our users would like to see.  The first is less of a feature and more of a necessity.  Our users are located all over the world and speak four different languages.  To accommodate all of these users we need to translate every bit of text on every page of our application for all of our users.  Luckily for us Django handles translation very nicely.  Read up on the Django translation here. This post will only cover the template tag {% trans %}, more will come as we develop more of our translation setup. Every template generated will need the tag {% load i18n %} at the top to have access to the trans tag.  From this point on any text string will need to be surrounded by the trans tag.  For example, my button has the code `Home` and to use the translation I simply change it to `{% trans "Home" %}`.  That string after the trans is going to be the id for the soon-to-be-created translation files...

A while back I wrote a post about Django translation and getting your websites to be translated.  Since then it has been pretty successful in our development version of the site and I have continued to learn the quirks of Django translation.  A couple of things to note: 2. In your .po files you will occasionally see that some of your strings have a #, fuzzy tag above them.  This means that there is already a translation found elsewhere and it's not sure if it should use your translation file in this app or the other one it knows about.  I had a lot of issues with this so I have been removing the fuzzy tag entirely when I find it and this forces Django to use the translation file as is. 4. Ordering matters in INSTALLED_APPS.  Django will load translation files in order of your INSTALLED_APPS list.  Django has a set of built in translated strings that it will use first before using your translations.  I found this was causing an issue when I didn't like the translation used for the...