{"id":8291,"date":"2026-09-17T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/poeditor.com\/blog\/?p=8291"},"modified":"2026-09-15T10:53:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T10:53:08","slug":"django-i18n","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/poeditor.com\/blog\/django-i18n\/","title":{"rendered":"Django i18n: How to translate and localize your app"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Django comes with an ORM, an admin site, authentication, and a template engine, so you can get an application up and running quickly. As the project grows, though, supporting users in different languages requires more than translating a few strings.

Internationalization (i18n) prepares the code for multiple languages and locales. Localization (l10n) provides the translations and formats dates, numbers, and other locale-specific content for each language. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this guide, we\u2019ll start with a Django TO-DO app whose text is hardcoded in English. We\u2019ll mark its strings for translation, translate them into French in POEditor, and configure the app to serve both languages. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Django translates out of the box<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Django installs its own message catalogs along with the framework. There are dozens of language directories under django\/conf\/locale\/<\/code>, most of them carrying a compiled catalog, plus a set inside each contrib app. Together, these catalogs cover the password validator messages, authentication views, form and field errors, the admin, and locale-specific date and number formats. pip install django<\/code> already put them on disk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Django serves those catalogs for a language the project has declared and activated. A fresh project declares nothing, so every response comes back in English whatever the browser asks for. A few settings and one middleware line are enough to enable language selection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Django translates its own messages, but it does not know anything about the strings in your application. \u201cCreate list\u201d, \u201cSigned in as demo\u201d, \u201cTask added.\u201d and every other string your team wrote stay English after that, because no catalog on disk contains them. Marking those strings, extracting them and getting translations back is the rest of this guide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The example is a small Django to-do app. You register with a username and a password, you are logged in straight away, and you create lists whose tasks you can add, edit, complete and delete. It includes page titles, form labels, buttons, filter pills, flash messages and counts\u2014enough interface text to make a useful translation catalog. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The lists page signed in as demo, English only<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Before you start<\/h3>\n\n\n\n