0013. English source, French shipped, no hard-coded strings

  • Status: accepted

  • Date: 2026-11-07

Context

Housecairn is written in English and ships in French from V1; more languages will come through a translation platform. Strings added without translation functions are the usual cause of half-translated screens.

Decision

  • English is the source language (LANGUAGE_CODE = "en"); LANGUAGES lists English and French. LocaleMiddleware picks the language from the browser.

  • Every user-visible string goes through gettext / gettext_lazy in Python and {% translate %} / {% blocktranslate %} in templates. The product name is not translated.

  • The catalog lives in src/housecairn/locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/django.po; the compiled django.mo is committed so the application runs without GNU gettext installed.

  • manage.py check_translations fails on an untranslated or fuzzy entry; --sources also runs makemessages (needs GNU gettext) and fails if a string of the code or templates is missing from the catalog. Both run in the tests, the second when gettext is available.

  • Dates, numbers and currencies are formatted with Django’s localization.

Consequences

  • A pull request that adds a string also updates django.po and django.mo:

    cd src/housecairn
uv run python ../../manage.py makemessages -l fr --no-obsolete --add-location=file -i "static/*"
uv run python ../../manage.py compilemessages -l fr
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