Django's internationalization is very nice (gettext based, LocaleMiddleware), but what is the proper way to translate the model name and the attributes for admin pages? I did not find anything about this in the documentation:

• http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/internationalization/
• http://www.djangobook.com/en/2.0/chapter19/

I would like to have "???????? ????? ??? ?????????" instead of "???????? order ??? ?????????". Note, the 'order' is not translated.

First, I defined a model, activated USE_I18N = True in settings.py, run django-admin makemessages -l ru. No entries are created by default for model names and attributes.

Grepping in the Django source code I found:

$ ack "Select %s to change"
contrib/admin/views/main.py
70:        self.title = (self.is_popup and ugettext('Select %s') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name) or ugettext('Select %s to change') % force_unicode(self.opts.verbose_name))

So the verbose_name meta property seems to play some role here. Tried to use it:

class Order(models.Model):
    subject = models.CharField(max_length=150)
    description = models.TextField()
    class Meta:
        verbose_name = _('order')

Now the updated po file contains msgid 'order' that can be translated. So I put the translation in. Unfortunately running the admin pages show the same mix of "???????? order ??? ?????????".

I'm currently using Django 1.1.1. Could somebody point me to the relevant documentation? Because google can not. ;-) In the mean time I'll dig deeper into the django source code...