Django translation: translate database content

Introduction

I was facing the difficulty to translate huge amounts of content in my Django project. My project has inside the database large quantities of content which I want to translate, in total to two additional languages other than English.

The solution: django-modeltranslation

This package is really easy to implement.

Steps to implement django-modeltranslation into your project

1. Install and Set Up django-modeltranslation: First, you need to install the django-modeltranslation package and add it to your Django project's INSTALLED_APPS.

   pip install django-modeltranslation

In your settings.py file, add 'modeltranslation' to your INSTALLED_APPS list.

   INSTALLED_APPS = [
       'modeltranslation',  # add the package here
       'django.contrib.admin',
       ...
   ]

Add the package name before django.contrib.admin to use the TranslationAdmin instead of the admin.ModelAdmin in the admin.py file.

1. Create translation.py:
   Create a translation.py file in the same directory as your models.py. This file will contain the translation options for your models.

2. Define TranslationOptions:
   In translation.py, define a class that inherits from TranslationOptions for each model you want to translate. You will specify which fields should be translatable.

Here’s an example using a simple Book model with title and description fields:

   # models.py

   from django.db import models

   class Book(models.Model):
       title = models.CharField(max_length=200)
       description = models.TextField()

       def __str__(self):
           return self.title

   # translation.py

   from modeltranslation.translator import register, TranslationOptions
   from .models import Book

   @register(Book)
   class BookTranslationOptions(TranslationOptions):
       fields = ('title', 'description')

be aware the fields attribute has to be a tuple! If you just want to use 'description' assign fields like: fields = ('description',)

1. Update Database Schema: Run makemigrations and migrate to create the necessary database tables and columns for the translated fields.

   python manage.py makemigrations
   python manage.py migrate

1. Accessing Translated Fields: After setting up the translation options, django-modeltranslation will automatically create translated versions of the specified fields for each language you have configured in your project. For example, if you have configured your project to support English and French, the Book model will have title_en, title_fr, description_en, and description_fr fields.

   # Example usage
   book = Book.objects.create(title="Title in English", description="Description in English")
   book.title_fr = "Titre en Français"
   book.description_fr = "Description en Français"
   book.save()

1. Admin Integration: To integrate translations into the Django admin, you need to register the translated model in the admin with TranslationAdmin.

   # admin.py
   from django.contrib import admin
   from modeltranslation.admin import TranslationAdmin
   from .models import Book

   @admin.register(Book)
   class BookAdmin(TranslationAdmin):
       pass

By following these steps, you can easily set up and use TranslationOptions in your Django models to handle multiple languages using django-modeltranslation.

• Django-modeltranslation documentation