Localizing Django

Various parts of Django, such as the admin site and validation error messages, are internationalized. This means they display differently depending on each user’s language or country. For this, Django uses the same internationalization and localization infrastructure available to Django applications, described in the i18n documentation.

Translations

Translations are contributed by Django users worldwide. The translation work is coordinated at Transifex.

If you find an incorrect translation or want to discuss specific translations, go to the Django project page. If you would like to help out with translating or add a language that isn’t yet translated, here’s what to do:

• Join the Django i18n mailing list and introduce yourself.

• Make sure you read the notes about Specialties of Django translation.

• Sign up at Transifex and visit the Django project page.

• On the Django project page, choose the language you want to work on, or – in case the language doesn’t exist yet – request a new language team by clicking on the “Request language” link and selecting the appropriate language.

• Then, click the “Join this Team” button to become a member of this team. Every team has at least one coordinator who is responsible to review your membership request. You can of course also contact the team coordinator to clarify procedural problems and handle the actual translation process.

• Once you are a member of a team choose the translation resource you want to update on the team page. For example the “core” resource refers to the translation catalog that contains all non-contrib translations. Each of the contrib apps also have a resource (prefixed with “contrib”).

  Note

  For more information about how to use Transifex, read the Transifex User Guide.

Formats

You can also review conf/locale/<locale>/formats.py. This file describes the date, time and numbers formatting particularities of your locale. See Format localization for details.

The format files aren’t managed by the use of Transifex. To change them, you must create a patch against the Django source tree, as for any code change:

• Create a diff against the current Git master branch.
• Open a ticket in Django’s ticket system, set its Component field to Translations, and attach the patch to it.

Documentation

There is also an opportunity to translate the documentation, though this is a huge undertaking to complete entirely (you have been warned!). We use the same Transifex tool. The translations will appear at https://docs.djangoproject.com/<language_code>/ when at least the docs/intro/* files are fully translated in your language.