Chapter 18. Internationalization

When creating message files from JavaScript source codeDjango was originally developed right in the middle of the United States-quite literally, as Lawrence, Kansas, is less than 40 miles from the geographic center of the continental United States. Like most open source projects, though, Django's community grew to include people from all over the globe. As Django's community became increasingly diverse, internationalization and localization became increasingly important.

Django itself is fully internationalized; all strings are marked for translation, and settings control the display of locale-dependent values like dates and times. Django also ships with more than 50 different localization files. If you're not a native English speaker, there's a good chance that Django is already translated into your primary language.

The same internationalization framework used for these localizations is available for you to use in your own code and templates.

Because many...