How to go about internationalization?

Question

I'm building a web application that will be in a single language (Dutch) at launch. However, at some point it might be translated to other languages as well, which is why I want to have internationalization build in from the start.

The problem is that currently there are 3 separate places that display strings, namely the templates, the python backend and some javascript. Since I've never internationalized an application of any kind I was wondering if there is some way of avoiding this spread? And also, what is the best way to go about internationalization?

Edit: As a bit of clarification, I'm using the following parts: Jinja2, Flask, WTForms jQuery, and on top of that a bunch of Python and Javascript code.

Answer 1

As far as I know, gettext is the most widely used tool for i18n. However, every language and framework implements it's own wrappers around this:

• python: gettext module
• flask, jinja2, WTForms: flask-babel extension
• javascript, jquery: gettext plugin

All of them should use the same translation files, so they should be able work together without any duplication in the translations.