在Django中本地化长文本的最佳实践？

Question

I just got done reading the Django docs on internationalization and something is bugging me.

It seems like the default language strings are themselves used as the keys for retrieving translations. That's perfectly fine for short text, but for paragraphs, it seems like poor design. Now, whenever I change the English (default) text, my keys change and I need to manually update my .po file?

It seems like using keys like "INTRO_TEXT" and retrieving the default language from it's own .po file is the right approach. How have others approached this problem and what has worked well for you?

Answer 1

Yes, you will have to manually update the PO files, but most of the times it will be limited to remove the fuzzy marks on out-of-date translations ( gettext marks translations as fuzzy when the original version is modified).

I personally prefer this approach as it keeps the text content in the source code which makes it much more readable (especially for HTML). I also find it hard to find good and concise string identifiers, poorly named identifiers are headache prone.

Django-rosetta will be of great help if you do not want to edit PO files by hand or want to delegate translations to non developers.