Translation docstrings with gettext

[Peter Otten]

sapient wrote:

> I found several discussions where this question was asked, but was not
> answered.
> 
> Now I am creating Python-API for my application, and want create it
> with translation support, including documentation strings for modules,
> classes, methods etc.
> 
> It is simple to translate special-marked strings with gettext, but it
> is problem with docstrings: if I mark them for translation like
> _("""Some documentation string""") then it is not recognized as
> docstring. If I omit _() markup, then string is not translated.
> 
> Script pygettext.py has key --docstrings that forces extraction
> docstrings from module, so I suppose, that it must be way to use thier
> translations.

> So, question is: How to translate docstrings in my example?

You could leave the docstrings alone and monkey-patch inspect.getdoc() to do 
the translation when help() is invoked:

#! /usr/bin/python2.6
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
import os, gettext

localedir = os.path.join( os.path.dirname(__file__), "locale/" )

t = gettext.translation( 'testmodule', localedir=localedir, 
languages=['ru'], codeset="utf-8" )
t.install()

import testmodule

import inspect
def getdoc(object):
    try:
        doc = object.__doc__
    except AttributeError:
        return None
    if not isinstance(doc, basestring):
        return None

    return inspect.cleandoc(_(doc))

inspect.getdoc = getdoc


help( testmodule )
testmodule.TestClass().testClassMethod()

Peter