Testing django internationalization - Mocking gettext

I couldn't find an existing way to do this. However from reading the Django source code I came up with a hacky, brittle way to do this by looking at the _active DjangoTranslation objects, then wrapping their ugettext methods. I've described it here: http://www.technomancy.org/python/django-i18n-test-translation-by-manually-setting-translations/

I've looked at your solution and I think it's both ingenious and simple for testing i18n support when you have no translation strings provided. But I'm afraid the translation package is just something that always works and which we take for granted, so seeing it's internals in heavily commented test code would, at least, make me run off in fear (chuckle).

I think creating a test application, added to INSTALLED_APPS in test settings, which provides it's own translations is a much cleaner approach. Your tests would be simplified to translation.activate('fr'); self.assertEqual('xxx_anything', gettext('anything'), 'i18n support should be activated.').

With simple tests, other developers could quickly follow-up and see that the test app's package contains a /locale directory, which should immediately document your approach.