Translation docstrings with gettext

sapient aleksey.rezvov at gmail.com
Mon Apr 5 06:31:42 EDT 2010


Hello.

I found several discussions where this question was asked, but was not
answered.

Now I am creating Python-API for my application, and want create it
with translation support, including documentation strings for modules,
classes, methods etc.

It is simple to translate special-marked strings with gettext, but it
is problem with docstrings: if I mark them for translation like
_("""Some documentation string""") then it is not recognized as
docstring. If I omit _() markup, then string is not translated.

Script pygettext.py has key --docstrings that forces extraction
docstrings from module, so I suppose, that it must be way to use thier
translations.

---
I create small example, that demonstrates this problem:
Module with docstrings for translation:
{{{
#!python
"""testmodule docstring"""

class TestClass:
    """testmodule.TestClass docstring"""

    def testClassMethod(self):
        """testmodule.TestClass.testClassMethod docstring"""
        print _("Call TestClass.testClassMethod()")
}}}

Script for testing translation:
{{{
#!python
import os, gettext

localedir = os.path.join( os.path.dirname(__file__), "locale/" )

t = gettext.translation( 'testmodule', localedir=localedir,
languages=['ru'], codeset="cp1251" )
t.install()

import testmodule

help( testmodule )
testmodule.TestClass().testClassMethod()
}}}

It successfully translates _("Call TestClass.testClassMethod()") but
all docstrings stay untranslated.
Full example exists here:
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B_rE4w6PFDYWODg5ZWJlYjMtYTQ5ZS00MTE3LTgxOWUtNjc5NzEzNzVjYzdh&hl=en

So, question is: How to translate docstrings in my example?



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