Overriding a translation of a third-party Django module

The Django Taggit app comes with nice translations for German, but we have some technically inclined users, who prefer the word „Tags“ over „Schlagwörter“. Still, we want to keep our de-de locale for everything else. We choose only to override this one translation.

Note that our Django app is called app.

# The locale directory must be created. If not, you get
# "CommandError: Unable to find a locale path to store translations for file app/__init__.py"
mkdir -p app/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/

# Usually, we would use "./manage.py makemessages" to collect our messages.
# Instead, we create a simple .po file
cat << EOF > app/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/django.po
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"

msgid "Tag"
msgstr "Tag"
msgid "Tags"
msgstr "Tags"
EOF

# Create the .mo files
./manage.py compilemessages -l de

We explicitly set the charset to UTF-8, so gettext uses the correct encoding when creating .mo files. To quote the Django docs:

Due to the way the gettext tools work internally and because we want to allow non-ASCII source strings in Django’s core and your applications, you must use UTF-8 as the encoding for your PO files

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