Mastering Django: Core

Internationalization: in Python code

Standard translation

Specify a translation string by using the function ugettext(). It's convention to import this as a shorter alias, _, to save typing.

Python's standard library gettext module installs _() into the global namespace, as an alias for gettext(). In Django, we have chosen not to follow this practice, for a couple of reasons:

• For international character set (Unicode) support, ugettext() is more useful than gettext(). Sometimes, you should be using ugettext_lazy() as the default translation method for a particular file. Without _() in the global namespace, the developer has to think about which is the most appropriate translation function.
• The underscore character (_) is used to represent the previous ...