Django not translating the site properly

Question

After spending too many hours on this, StackOverflow is for the rescue.

I configured my settings.py as below:

...
TIME_ZONE = 'Europe/Berlin'

LANGUAGE_CODE = 'de'

LANGUAGES = (
  ('en', u'English'),
  ('de', u'German'),
  ('fr', u'French'),
)

USE_I18N = True

USE_L10N = True

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
    'django.middleware.csrf.CsrfViewMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.auth.middleware.AuthenticationMiddleware',
    'django.contrib.messages.middleware.MessageMiddleware',
)

TEMPLATE_CONTEXT_PROCESSORS = (
    'django.contrib.auth.context_processors.auth',
    'django.core.context_processors.debug',
    'django.core.context_processors.i18n',
    'django.core.context_processors.request',
    'django.core.context_processors.static',
    'django.contrib.messages.context_processors.messages',
)
...

In my base.html file, I have a form as below:

<form action="/i18n/setlang/" method="post">
    {% csrf_token %}
    <input name="next" type="hidden" value="/" />
    <select name="language">
        {% get_language_info_list for LANGUAGES as languages %}
        {% for language in languages %}
            <option value="{{ language.code }}">{{ language.name_local }} ({{ language.code }})</option>
        {% endfor %}
    </select>
    <input type="submit" value="Go" />
</form>

My urls.py:

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    url(r'^i18n/', include('django.conf.urls.i18n')),
    url(r'^$', 'MainApp.views.index'), #root
)

In the same base.html file, I have on top {% load i18n %} and in the body, I have a sample {% trans "This is the title." %}. Before running the server, I did:

django-admin.py makemessages -l de
django-admin.py makemessages -l fr

The sample text above was picked up by makemessages, and I provided the respective translations for msgstr. After that, I did django-admin.py compilemessages. The command ran nicely and generated the .mo files in the respective locale folders.

I run the server and the the form does not work. From a another StackOverflow post, I was hinted to remove the #, fuzzy lines, which I did. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You should put the LocaleMiddleware after the SessionMiddleware in your MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware',
'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware',
'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
....
)

The order of middleware classes is important. The LocaleMiddleware uses session data to detect the user language, so it must come after the SessionMiddleware. It is also mentioned in the docs here https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.3/topics/i18n/deployment/#how-django-discovers-language-preference

Let's hope this works for you!