When should I use ugettext_lazy?

An excellent use of _noop, is when you want to log a message in English for the developers, but present the translated string to a viewer. An example of this is at http://blog.bessas.me/posts/using-gettext-in-django/

gettext() vs. gettext_lazy()

In definitions like forms or models you should use gettext_lazy because the code of this definitions is only executed once (mostly on django's startup); gettext_lazy translates the strings in a lazy fashion, which means, eg. every time you access the name of an attribute on a model the string will be newly translated-which totally makes sense because you might be looking at this model in different languages since django was started!

In views and similar function calls you can use gettext without problems, because everytime the view is called gettext will be newly executed, so you will always get the right translation fitting the request!

Regarding gettext_noop()

As Bryce pointed out in his answer, this function marks a string as extractable for translation but does return the untranslated string. This is useful for using the string in two places – translated and untranslated. See the following example:

import logging
from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.utils.translation import gettext as _, gettext_noop as _noop

def view(request):
    msg = _noop("An error has occurred")
    logging.error(msg)
    return HttpResponse(_(msg))