Enabling translations

Preview the translation on a particular site: take URL and append ?preview-lang=LC

e.g. learning.nyif.com?preview-lang=zh-cn (for chinese)

Wrap all custom text in: 

${_("text")}

Handle links:

${_("blah blah blah {link_start}blah blah{link_end} blah blah").format(link_start=u"<a href='example.com'>", link_end=u"</a>")}

Error: ___ is not callable. Add: 

<%! from django.utils.translation import ugettext as _ %> 

to top of template (e.g. theme-footer.html)

Generating the translation files:

This is all done in devstack.

sudo su edxapp 	
cd /edx/app/edxapp/edx-platform 	
cp -r ../themes/ThemeName/templates/* lms/templates 	
i18n_tools extract
This will pull all of the text out of those curly braces and put them into a .po file; specifically: edx-platform/conf/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/mako.po

You need to manually copy and paste the strings to the django.po file of whichever language you want (e.g. edx-platform/conf/locale/zh_CN/LC_MESSAGES/django.po)

run:

i18n_tools generate
which will compile the django.po into a django.mo file

(optional) check to make sure that it worked: paver devstack --fast lms

commit the .po and .mo files and clean the repo

git add conf/
git
Caveats:

don't have duplicate strings in the .po file. If you have the same string more than once, bad things will happen.

useful:

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/topics/i18n/translation/