Finding missing translations in django `.po` files

Question

Working with Django, you can use django.utils.translation.ugettext and ....ugettext_lazy (as well as some template tags) to handle translation of localized messages.

Later, with command: django-admin.py makemessages -l <LANGUAGE> you can generate the po file containing the original string, so that the developer can specify the desired translation.

Question: is there a django command, or any other quick way, to find out which messages have not been translated?

Usually I look for the string msgstr "" in the po file, but that's inaccurate, since some translations are multiline, like the following:

#file.py:xyz
msgid ""
"Some very long text"
msgstr ""
"The translation of some very long text"

Thus, looking for msgstr "" I get "false positives" (i.e. strings that are actually translated, but whose translation start the next line). With thousand of lines, this quite often.

Any smart suggestion?

Thanks

From what I've seen, django seems to put then untranslated to the top (or possibly the bottom can't remember) of the list of translations — Sayse, Oct 28 '15 at 09:46
No, I don't think so. I find them in the middle of my `po` file :-/ — FSp, Oct 28 '15 at 09:50
Hmm, I can't remember then, our translators switched over to using Poedit which kind of negates this entire problem — Sayse, Oct 28 '15 at 09:51
Don't know what IDE you are using, but in PyCharm you can search by regex: `""\n\n` this highlights all untranslated entries. — Leistungsabfall, Oct 28 '15 at 10:18
In PyCharm adding newline field to search can be done with Crtl +Shift + Enter — Viljami, Aug 12 '22 at 07:10

Art · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-29T15:59:29.817

6

Assuming you are using some popular editors:

in most editors, simply search msgstr ""\n\n
under windows / with notepad, maybe you will need something like msgstr ""\r\n\r\n
you could also try some specialized editors, check this
ultimatively, you could do the following: sed -i '/msgstr ""/{N;N; s/\n\n/\n# translate me!\n\n/g}' django.po and then search for # translate me! comments in the file.

edited Aug 29 '21 at 15:59

answered Oct 28 '15 at 12:48

Art

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Oops. Just realized that the last one was broken. Whatever, made another one. – Art Oct 28 '15 at 13:45

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 15 '19 at 22:12

4

You can use

msgfmt --statistics --output=/dev/null locale/django.po

to see how many missing translations there are (if any), and

msgattrib --untranslated locale/fr/LC_MESSAGES/django.po

to list the untranslated messages.

answered Sep 15 '19 at 22:12

Yoan Tournade

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score 3 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 09 '19 at 10:12

The easiest way to check for missing translations, and other errors, would be to use the "msgcmp" utility. It's actually supposed to be used to compare a translations file (.po) against a template (.pot), but it's perfectly happy to compare a .po file against itself:

msgcmp path/to/nl.po path/to/nl.po

will do the trick, and even fail if any translations are marked as fuzzy (unless you specify --use-fuzzy).

Finding missing translations in django `.po` files

3 Answers3