Internationalization

NDR Core’s internationalization is based on the GNU gettext library. Only the parts of the code that are frontend-visible are internationalized. The administrative interface is in English only.

In the ndr_core base directory, there is a folder named “locale”. This folder contains a folder for each language that NDR Core supports. NDR Core uses simple language codes for the folder names, such as “en” for English and “fr” for French. It is not necessary to use the full language code, such as “en_US” or “fr_FR”.

Updating Translations

After updates in the code, the translations may need to be updated. This is done withe the help of the django-admin makemessages command. To update the translations, run the following command from the ndr_core base directory:

django-admin makemessages -l <language_code>

Alternately, to update all translations, run the following command from the ndr_core base directory:

django-admin makemessages -a

This will generate or update the .po files in the locale folders. The .po files contain the translations for the strings in the code. The .po files are human-readable and can be edited with a text editor.

After the .po files have been updated, the translations can be updated with the django-admin compilemessages command. To update the translations, run the following command from the ndr_core base directory:

django-admin compilemessages

This will generate or update the .mo files in the locale folders.

Adding a New Language

To add a new language, create a new folder in the locale directory with the language code. For example, to add Spanish, create a folder named “es” in the locale directory.

After creating the folder, run the following command from the ndr_core base directory:

django-admin makemessages -l <language_code>

This will generate the .po file for the new language.

After the .po file has been created, the translations can be added to the file.

After the translations have been added, run the following command from the ndr_core base directory:

django-admin compilemessages

To make the language available in the frontend, add the language to the initial_values.json fixture file. If you plan to use the newly created language in your current project, add it to the database manually.

To do that, update the key “available_languages” table ndrcore_value with the new language code. You’ll have to update the string in the following form:

(en,English);(de,Deutsch);(fr,Français);(it,Italiano)

The string is a semicolon-separated list of tuples, where the first element of the tuple is the language code and the second element is the language name. The language code must correspond to the folder name in the locale directory.