Add Flemish (nl-BE) support to Django

This tutorial will help you add Flemish (Belgian Dutch, or nl-BE) support for Django (or any combination of language and locale, such as en-GB, en-US or fr-CA for instance).

This was really troublesome as I found Django’s help on the subject really hard to understand, and there weren’t any helpful resources that I could find on the Internet about this.

Furthermore, Django’s tools themselves don’t seem to do things right (```./manage.py compilemessages –locale nl-be` doing the wrong thing in this instance).

Settings.py

Open your settings.py file and add the new language to your LANGUAGES parameter like so:

LANGUAGES = (
    ('en', _('English')),
    ('nl-be', _('Flemish')),
)

Locale translation files

Now let’s use Django’s makemessages command to create translation files for our new language!

(venv)Antonins-MacBook-Air:myproject antonin$ ./manage.py makemessages --locale nl_BE

Note that we wrote the language code differently than in settings.py! This is very important, as Django won’t load the tranlsations otherwise!

Then, you just need to put your translations inside the new nl_BE/ directory in your locale folder(s) and compile them:

(venv)Antonins-MacBook-Air:myproject antonin$ ./manage.py compilemessages