Override default Django translations
The easiest way is to collect the .po file found in the django.contrib.admin locale folder and re-compiling it (you can use POEdit for doing so).
You could also override the django.contrib.admin templates by putting them in your projects templates folder (for example: yourproject/templates/admin/change_form.html) then running makemessages from the project root (although this is no longer supported for django 1.4 alpha if i'm correct)
edit: Robert Lujo's answer is the clean method
Based on Robert Lujo answer, his alternative is totally working. And IMO simpler (keep the overriden locales in a special .po file only). Here are the steps:
Add an extra path to the LOCALE_PATHS Django settings.
LOCALE_PATHS = (
# the default one, where the makemessages command will generate the files os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'myproject', 'locale'),
# our new, extended locale dir
os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'myproject', 'locale_extra'), )
find the original Django (or 3rd party) string to be translated
- ex.: "recent actions" for the Django admin 'recent actions' block
- Add the new .po file "myproject/locale_extra/en/LC_MESSAGES/django.po" with the alternative translation :
msgid "Recent actions"
msgstr "Last actions"
- Compile your messages as usual
This is what worked for me:
create a file in your app folder which will hold django messages for which translations need to be overridden, e.g.
django_standard_messages.py
in django lib folder or in
django.po
files find the message (string) that needs to be overridden, e.g.django.forms/fields.py
has message_(u"This field is required.")
which we want to translate to german differentlyin
django_standard_messages.py
add all such messages like this:
# coding: utf-8 _ = lambda s: s django_standard_messages_to_override = [ _("This field is required."), ... ]
- Translate the file (
makemessages
,compilemessages
) - makemessages will add added django standard messages in your application .po file, find them and translate, run compilemessages to update .mo file - tryout
The logic behind: (I think ;) ) - when ugettext
function searches translation for one message (string), there are several .po
/.mo
files that needs to be searched through. The first match is used. So, if our local app .po
/.mo
is first in that order, our translations will override all other (e.g. django default).
Alternative
When you need to translate all or most of django default messages, the other possibility (which I didn't tried) is to copy default django .po
file in our locale or some other special folder, and fix translations and register the folder (if new) in LOCALE_PATHS
django settings
file as first entry in the list.
The logic behind: is the very similar as noted in previous section.