Internationalization¶
Multi-language content¶
Overview¶
Out of the box, Wagtail assumes all content will be authored in a single language. This document describes how to configure Wagtail for authoring content in multiple languages.
Note
Wagtail provides the infrastructure for creating and serving content in multiple languages. There are two options for managing translations across different languages in the admin interface: wagtail.contrib.simple_translation or the more advanced wagtail-localize (third-party package).
This document only covers the internationalization of content managed by Wagtail. For information on how to translate static content in template files, JavaScript code, etc, refer to the Django internationalization docs. Or, if you are building a headless site, refer to the docs of the frontend framework you are using.
Wagtail’s approach to multi-lingual content¶
This section provides an explanation of Wagtail’s internationalization approach. If you’re in a hurry, you can skip to Configuration.
In summary:
Wagtail stores content in a separate page tree for each locale
It has a built-in
Locale
model and all pages are linked to aLocale
with thelocale
foreign key fieldIt records which pages are translations of each other using a shared UUID stored in the
translation_key
fieldIt automatically routes requests through translations of the site’s homepage
It uses Django’s
i18n_patterns
andLocaleMiddleware
for language detection
Page structure¶
Wagtail stores content in a separate page tree for each locale.
For example, if you have two sites in two locales, then you will see four homepages at the top level of the page hierarchy in the explorer.
This approach has some advantages for the editor experience as well:
There is no default language for editing, so content can be authored in any language and then translated to any other.
Translations of a page are separate pages so they can be published at different times.
Editors can be given permission to edit content in one locale and not others.
How locales and translations are recorded in the database¶
All pages (and any snippets that have translation enabled) have a locale
and
translation_key
field:
locale
is a foreign key to theLocale
modeltranslation_key
is a UUID that’s used to find translations of a piece of content. Translations of the same page/snippet share the same value in this field
These two fields have a ‘unique together’ constraint so you can’t have more than one translation in the same locale.
Translated homepages¶
When you set up a site in Wagtail, you select the site’s homepage in the ‘root page’ field and all requests to that site’s root URL will be routed to that page.
Multi-lingual sites have a separate homepage for each locale that exists as siblings in the page tree. Wagtail finds the other homepages by looking for translations of the site’s ‘root page’.
This means that to make a site available in another locale, you just need to translate and publish its homepage in that new locale.
If Wagtail can’t find a homepage that matches the user’s language, it will fall back to the page that is selected as the ‘root page’ on the site record, so you can use this field to specify the default language of your site.
Language detection and routing¶
For detecting the user’s language and adding a prefix to the URLs
(/en/
, /fr-fr/
, for example), Wagtail is designed to work with Django’s
built-in internationalization utilities such as i18n_patterns
and
LocaleMiddleware
. This means that Wagtail should work seamlessly with any
other internationalized Django applications on your site.
Locales¶
The locales that are enabled on a site are recorded in the Locale
model in
wagtailcore
. This model has just two fields: ID and language_code
which
stores the BCP-47 language tag
that represents this locale.
The locale records can be set up with an optional management UI or created
in the shell. The possible values of the language_code
field are controlled
by the WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES
setting.
Note
Read this if you’ve changed LANGUAGE_CODE
before enabling internationalization
On initial migration, Wagtail creates a Locale
record for the language that
was set in the LANGUAGE_CODE
setting at the time the migration was run. All
pages will be assigned to this Locale
when Wagtail’s internationalization is disabled.
If you have changed the LANGUAGE_CODE
setting since updating to Wagtail 2.11,
you will need to manually update the record in the Locale
model too before
enabling internationalization, as your existing content will be assigned to the old code.
Configuration¶
In this section, we will go through the minimum configuration required to enable content to be authored in multiple languages.
Enabling internationalization¶
To enable internationalization in both Django and Wagtail, set the following
settings to True
:
# my_project/settings.py
USE_I18N = True
WAGTAIL_I18N_ENABLED = True
In addition, you might also want to enable Django’s localization support. This will make dates and numbers display in the user’s local format:
# my_project/settings.py
USE_L10N = True
Configuring available languages¶
Next we need to configure the available languages. There are two settings for this that are each used for different purposes:
LANGUAGES
- This sets which languages are available on the frontend of the site.WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES
- This sets which the languages Wagtail content can be authored in.
You can set both of these settings to the exact same value. For example, to enable English, French, and Spanish:
# my_project/settings.py
WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES = LANGUAGES = [
('en', "English"),
('fr', "French"),
('es', "Spanish"),
]
Note
Whenever WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES
is changed, the Locale
model needs
to be updated as well to match.
This can either be done with a data migration or with the optional locale management UI described in the next section.
You can also set these to different values. You might want to do this if you want to have some programmatic localization (like date formatting or currency, for example) but use the same Wagtail content in multiple regions:
# my_project/settings.py
LANGUAGES = [
('en-GB', "English (Great Britain)"),
('en-US', "English (United States)"),
('en-CA', "English (Canada)"),
('fr-FR', "French (France)"),
('fr-CA', "French (Canada)"),
]
WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES = [
('en-GB', "English"),
('fr-FR', "French"),
]
When configured like this, the site will be available in all the different locales in the first list, but there will only be two language trees in Wagtail.
All the en-
locales will use the “English” language tree, and the fr-
locales will use the “French” language tree. The differences between each locale
in a language would be programmatic. For example: which date/number format to
use, and what currency to display prices in.
Enabling the locale management UI (optional)¶
An optional locale management app exists to allow a Wagtail administrator to set up the locales from the Wagtail admin interface.
To enable it, add wagtail.locales
into INSTALLED_APPS
:
# my_project/settings.py
INSTALLED_APPS = [
# ...
'wagtail.locales',
# ...
]
Adding a language prefix to URLs¶
To allow all of the page trees to be served at the same domain, we need to add a URL prefix for each language.
To implement this, we can use Django’s built-in i18n_patterns function, which adds a language prefix to all of the URL patterns passed into it. This activates the language code specified in the URL and Wagtail takes this into account when it decides how to route the request.
In your project’s urls.py
add Wagtail’s core URLs (and any other URLs you
want to be translated) into an i18n_patterns
block:
# /my_project/urls.py
# ...
from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns
# Non-translatable URLs
# Note: if you are using the Wagtail API or sitemaps,
# these should not be added to `i18n_patterns` either
urlpatterns = [
path('django-admin/', admin.site.urls),
path('admin/', include(wagtailadmin_urls)),
path('documents/', include(wagtaildocs_urls)),
]
# Translatable URLs
# These will be available under a language code prefix. For example /en/search/
urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
path('search/', search_views.search, name='search'),
path("", include(wagtail_urls)),
)
Bypass language prefix for the default language¶
If you want your default language to have URLs that resolve normally without a language prefix,
you can set the prefix_default_language
parameter of i18n_patterns
to False
.
For example, if you have your languages configured like this:
# myproject/settings.py
# ...
LANGUAGE_CODE = 'en'
WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES = LANGUAGES = [
('en', "English"),
('fr', "French"),
]
# ...
And your urls.py
configured like this:
# myproject/urls.py
# ...
# These URLs will be available under a language code prefix only for languages that
# are not set as default in LANGUAGE_CODE.
urlpatterns += i18n_patterns(
path('search/', search_views.search, name='search'),
path("", include(wagtail_urls)),
prefix_default_language=False,
)
Your URLs will now be prefixed only for the French version of your website, for example:
- /search/
- /fr/search/
User language auto-detection¶
After wrapping your URL patterns with i18n_patterns
, your site will now
respond on URL prefixes. But now it won’t respond on the root path.
To fix this, we need to detect the user’s browser language and redirect them
to the best language prefix. The recommended approach to do this is with
Django’s LocaleMiddleware
:
# my_project/settings.py
MIDDLEWARE = [
# ...
'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware',
# ...
]
Custom routing/language detection¶
You don’t strictly have to use i18n_patterns
or LocaleMiddleware
for
this and you can write your own logic if you need to.
All Wagtail needs is the language to be activated (using Django’s
django.utils.translation.activate
function) before the
wagtail.views.serve
view is called.
Recipes for internationalized sites¶
Language/region selector¶
Perhaps the most important bit of internationalization-related UI you can add to your site is a selector to allow users to switch between different languages.
If you’re not convinced that you need this, have a look at https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-site-conneg#stickiness for some rationale.
Basic example¶
Here is a basic example of how to add links between translations of a page.
This example, however, will only include languages defined in
WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES
and not any extra languages that might be defined
in LANGUAGES
. For more information on what both of these settings mean, see
Configuring available languages.
If both settings are set to the same value, this example should work well for you, otherwise skip to the next section that has a more complicated example which takes this into account.
{# make sure these are at the top of the file #}
{% load wagtailcore_tags %}
{% if page %}
{% for translation in page.get_translations.live %}
<a href="{% pageurl translation %}" rel="alternate" hreflang="{{ translation.locale.language_code }}">
{{ translation.locale.language_name_local }}
</a>
{% endfor %}
{% endif %}
Let’s break this down:
{% if page %}
...
{% endif %}
If this is part of a shared base template it may be used in situations where no page object is available, such as 404 error responses, so check that we have a page before proceeding.
{% for translation in page.get_translations.live %}
...
{% endfor %}
This for
block iterates through all published translations of the current page.
<a href="{% pageurl translation %}" rel="alternate" hreflang="{{ translation.locale.language_code }}">
{{ translation.locale.language_name_local }}
</a>
This adds a link to the translation. We use {{ translation.locale.language_name_local }}
to display
the name of the locale in its own language. We also add rel
and hreflang
attributes to the <a>
tag for SEO.
translation.locale
is an instance of the Locale model.
Alternatively, a built-in tag from Django that gets info about the language of the translation. For more information, see get_language_info in the Django docs.
{% load i18n %}
{% get_language_info for translation.locale.language_code as lang %}
API filters for headless sites¶
For headless sites, the Wagtail API supports two extra filters for internationalized sites:
?locale=
Filters pages by the given locale?translation_of=
Filters pages to only include translations of the given page ID
For more information, see Special filters for internationalized sites.
Translatable snippets¶
You can make a snippet translatable by making it inherit from wagtail.models.TranslatableMixin
.
For example:
# myapp/models.py
from django.db import models
from wagtail.models import TranslatableMixin
from wagtail.snippets.models import register_snippet
@register_snippet
class Advert(TranslatableMixin, models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
The TranslatableMixin
model adds the locale
and translation_key
fields to the model.
Making snippets with existing data translatable¶
For snippets with existing data, it’s not possible to just add TranslatableMixin
,
make a migration, and run it. This is because the locale
and translation_key
fields are both required and translation_key
needs a unique value for each
instance.
To migrate the existing data properly, we first need to use BootstrapTranslatableMixin
,
which excludes these constraints, then add a data migration to set the two fields, then
switch to TranslatableMixin
.
This is only needed if there are records in the database. So if the model is empty, you can
go straight to adding TranslatableMixin
and skip this.
Step 1: Add BootstrapTranslatableMixin
to the model¶
This will add the two fields without any constraints:
# myapp/models.py
from django.db import models
from wagtail.models import BootstrapTranslatableMixin
from wagtail.snippets.models import register_snippet
@register_snippet
class Advert(BootstrapTranslatableMixin, models.Model):
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
# if the model has a Meta class, ensure it inherits from
# BootstrapTranslatableMixin.Meta too
class Meta(BootstrapTranslatableMixin.Meta):
verbose_name = 'adverts'
Run python manage.py makemigrations myapp
to generate the schema migration.
Step 2: Create a data migration¶
Create a data migration with the following command:
python manage.py makemigrations myapp --empty
This will generate a new empty migration in the app’s migrations
folder. Edit
that migration and add a BootstrapTranslatableModel
for each model to bootstrap
in that app:
from django.db import migrations
from wagtail.models import BootstrapTranslatableModel
class Migration(migrations.Migration):
dependencies = [
('myapp', '0002_bootstraptranslations'),
]
# Add one operation for each model to bootstrap here
# Note: Only include models that are in the same app!
operations = [
BootstrapTranslatableModel('myapp.Advert'),
]
Repeat this for any other apps that contain a model to be bootstrapped.
Step 3: Change BootstrapTranslatableMixin
to TranslatableMixin
¶
Now that we have a migration that fills in the required fields, we can swap out
BootstrapTranslatableMixin
for TranslatableMixin
that has all the
constraints:
# myapp/models.py
from wagtail.models import TranslatableMixin # Change this line
@register_snippet
class Advert(TranslatableMixin, models.Model): # Change this line
name = models.CharField(max_length=255)
class Meta(TranslatableMixin.Meta): # Change this line, if present
verbose_name = 'adverts'
Step 4: Run makemigrations
to generate schema migrations, then migrate!¶
Run makemigrations
to generate the schema migration that adds the
constraints into the database, then run migrate
to run all of the
migrations:
python manage.py makemigrations myapp
python manage.py migrate
When prompted to select a fix for the nullable field ‘locale’ being changed to non-nullable, select the option “Ignore for now” (as this has been handled by the data migration).
Translation workflow¶
As mentioned at the beginning, Wagtail does supply wagtail.contrib.simple_translation
.
The simple_translation module provides a user interface that allows users to copy pages and translatable snippets into another language.
Copies are created in the source language (not translated)
Copies of pages are in draft status
Content editors need to translate the content and publish the pages.
To enable add "wagtail.contrib.simple_translation"
to INSTALLED_APPS
and run python manage.py migrate
to create the submit_translation
permissions.
In the Wagtail admin, go to settings and give some users or groups the “Can submit translations” permission.
Note
Simple Translation is optional. It can be switched out by third-party packages. Like the more advanced wagtail-localize.
Wagtail Localize¶
As part of the initial work on implementing internationalization for Wagtail core,
we also created a translation package called wagtail-localize
. This supports
translating pages within Wagtail, using PO files, machine translation, and external
integration with translation services.
Alternative internationalization plugins¶
Before official multi-language support was added into Wagtail, site implementers had to use external plugins. These have not been replaced by Wagtail’s own implementation as they use slightly different approaches, one of them might fit your use case better:
For a comparison of these options, see AccordBox’s blog post How to support multi-language in Wagtail CMS.
Wagtail admin translations¶
The Wagtail admin backend has been translated into many different languages. You can find a list of currently available translations on Wagtail’s Transifex page. (Note: if you’re using an old version of Wagtail, this page may not accurately reflect what languages you have available).
If your language isn’t listed on that page, you can easily contribute new languages or correct mistakes. Sign up and submit changes to Transifex. Translation updates are typically merged into an official release within one month of being submitted.
Change Wagtail admin language on a per-user basis¶
Logged-in users can set their preferred language from /admin/account/
.
By default, Wagtail provides a list of languages that have a >= 90% translation coverage.
It is possible to override this list via the WAGTAILADMIN_PERMITTED_LANGUAGES setting.
In case there is zero or one language permitted, the form will be hidden.
If there is no language selected by the user, the LANGUAGE_CODE
will be used.
Changing the primary language of your Wagtail installation¶
The default language of Wagtail is en-us
(American English). You can change this by tweaking a couple of Django settings:
Make sure USE_I18N is set to
True
Set LANGUAGE_CODE to your websites’ primary language
If there is a translation available for your language, the Wagtail admin backend should now be in the language you’ve chosen.