How to get a specific language translation using pybabel

Question

Most of the time, using Babel's gettext() or _() is with a current locale set within the current context, so that the target language is implicit, it is not passed as an argument to gettext().

However, is there a way to get the translation of a phrase in a given target language, such as:

message = gettext('Hello there', language='es')

The original gettext does not have this possibility, but is there any other API that would achieve this ?

Guido Flohr · Accepted Answer · 2018-10-08 06:50:22Z

0

If you're using the plain gettext API, use environment variables:

import os

os.environ['LANGUAGE'] = 'en'
message = gettext('Hello there')

For OO gettext it goes like this:

import gettext

fr = gettext.translation('yourdomain', languages=['fr'])
es = gettext.translation('yourdomain', languages=['es'])

fr.install()
// use French ...
es.install()
// use Spanish ...

answered Oct 8, 2018 at 6:50

Guido Flohr

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4 Comments

patb Over a year ago

Thanks, this might help some people, but in my case I'm in a web server multi-user environment using Flash, so I doubt the os.environ trick would do it. Actually there are tricks to switch locale in Flask via ctx = _request_ctx_stack.top then ctx.babel_locale = Locale.parse(language), but I was looking for a true API to babel, with locale as argument.

Guido Flohr Over a year ago

The os.environ trick should work everywhere. An API call with the locale as an argument is very unlikely to exist because the underlying C API does not have anything like that, and that is on purpose.

Rob Grant Over a year ago

@GuidoFlohr that seems like such a crazy system. How is an OS variable baked so deep in the code, instead of being one of the ways the language can be selected, of several!?

Guido Flohr Over a year ago

@RobGrant, the idea behind that is consistency so that number formats, dates, and messages all match. That makes a lot of sense for desktop applications but not so much for web applications. But I hear you, and this is why the gettext implementations that I have written - libintl-perl for Perl and esgettext for TypeScript/JavaScript - also allow you to simply hardcode the language, resp. the locale identifier, assuming that you know which locales are supported by your application.

bagonyi · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-05 11:38:02Z

0

If you are using Flask-Babel, you can use force_locale from its Low-Level API:

from flask_babel import force_locale

with force_locale('en_US'):
    send_email(gettext('Hello!'), ...)

answered Nov 5, 2020 at 11:38

bagonyi

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