What we stripped away

The usual workflow for translating apps is pretty complex. We made it simple by removing some of the steps that don’t bring much of a value in a regular translation pipeline. Our design philosophy is “make simple simple, make complex possible”. There are some of these things:

• The compiled translations are stored next to your Python code instead of /usr/share/locale.

• We don’t generate *.pot files. Instead, we directly create empty *.po files for all languages.

• You don’t need to explicitly update translations for each language. Instead, the extract command updates all translation files in place.

• There is only one translation file per project per language. No need to merge multiple files together.

• There is no LC_MESSAGES subdirectory because “flat is better than nested”.

• There is only one .get method instead of the whole mess of similar ones (gettext, ngettext, pgettext, and so on) provided by gettext.

• The locale doesn’t have categories. While UNIX and other OS allow to specify locale for each action (LC_TIME for formatting time, LC_NUMERIC for formatting numbers), we make one-to-one correspondence between locales and categories. If you need to format a number in a different locale, just use a separate Locale instance for it.