Few months ago I looked for i18n data collections and I found WeBDA. It’s used by Satchmo and it could be easily integrated with other django projects.

I looked also at Babel and I wrote a simple middleware class that allows to have locale data collections available accessing the LOCALE attribute of request objects:

import babel

try:
    from threading import local
except ImportError:
    from django.utils._threading_local import local

_thread_locals = local()

def get_current_locale():
    “””
    Get current locale data outside views.
    See http://babel.edgewall.org/wiki/ApiDocs/babel.core for Locale
    objects documentation
    “””
    return getattr(_thread_locals, ‘locale’, None)

class BabelMiddleware(object):
    “””
    This is a very simple middleware that uses
    babel (http://babel.edgewall.org) for accessing locale
    data in request objects through request.LOCALE attribute
    “””
    def process_request(self, request):
        try:
            locale = babel.Locale.parse(request.LANGUAGE_CODE, sep=’-‘)
        except (ValueError, babel.UnknownLocaleError):
            pass
        else:
            _thread_locals.locale = locale
            setattr(request, ‘LOCALE’, locale)

The get_current_locale function allows also to access locale data outside application views. This middleware configuration must be placed after the ‘django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware’ MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES setting.

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    … cut …
    ‘django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware’,
    ‘middleware.locale.BabelMiddleware’,
    … cut …
)