date format won't translate

Django Internals Internationalization
1

Apologizes for what may be a simple answer, but I am really stuck here.

Strings translate properly in my app, however, dates only show in English format, not the language set by translation.activate.

settings.py:

USE_I18N = True
USE_L10N = True
USE_TZ = True

LANGUAGES = [
(“en”, “English”),
(“fr”, “Français”),
]

Directory structure (locale is in my app, not the project).

project
±myapp
±locale

LOCAL_PATHS are configured, ‘django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware’ is added correctly.

If I call “translation.activate(‘fr’)” before rendering my templates, the strings show up in French, but the dates are still formatted in English.

How can I get the date filter for format in the specified language?

2

You should definitely not call “translation.activate(‘fr’)” yourself, this will mask your real configuration issue. With LocaleMiddleware, Django should automatically choose the language based on the browser preferred language.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the suggestion.

Each user has a preferred language in their profile (English or French).
The idea is that the app will switch to the user’s preferred language - ignoring the browser’s preferred language.

Is there a better way other than calling “translation.activate(<<users.preferred_language>>)”?

And, I still need LocalMiddleware to get the default language for the login page.
This page also has a language selector so the user can change to their language before logging in.
After logging in, the app should only display in the user’s language.

4

I think I would mimic Django and use the response.set_cookie() command that you can see in django.views.i18n.set_language, as soon as you redirect the user after login.

5

If I understand the docs correctly, set_cookie should not be necessary as I am using user sessions, but I followed the code in the examples.

This still didn’t not work and Django cannot find any of its own translations.

Given my deadline (and some desperation), I created a new .po file with the day and month translations from the django system file and put it on my LOCALE_PATHS.
This works, but there was a problem (more on that later).

My users don’t run as administrator, so this has little impact on the app as a whole.
It’s a scheduling application, so it is important that dates work :wink:

And finally, I noticed that in …/site-packages/django/conf/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/django.po, all the month and day translations appear to be commented out (those lines starts with #~).
I am not sure why this is, but I had to uncomment those lines to get my new django.po file to work.
This could have been my problem - my venv is in the same folder as my project, so compilemessages created a new django system .mo from the .po file.
But, that means that the the .po and .mo django system files aren’t consistent.
Or perhaps, the .po file was corrupted when I ran “makemessages” and it went through all the django directories.

6

Than I would suggest to remove and reinstall Django in your venv.