Add translation.activate decorator/context manager

[Ralph Broenink]

Currently, internationalization outside of templates and views requires several lines of code, identically each time:

from django.utils import translation
def welcome_translated(language):
    cur_language = translation.get_language()
    try:
        translation.activate(language)
        text = translation.ugettext('welcome')
    finally:
        translation.activate(cur_language)
    return text

(source: ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/i18n/)

However, this could easily be fitted within both decorators and context managers, allowing the following syntax:

@translation.activate(language)
def welcome_translated(language):
    return translation.ugettext('welcome')

or

def welcome_translated(language):
    with translation.activate(language):
        return translation.ugettext('welcome')

This would decrease the lines of code and the developer would not have to care for the case when the execution somehow fails and forgets to add the try/finally clause.

[Jannis Leidel]

There is already one at https://code.djangoproject.com/browser/django/trunk/django/utils/translation/__init__.py?rev=16405#L111

def welcome_translated(language):
    with translation.override(language):
        return translation.ugettext('welcome')

[Ralph Broenink]

Didn't notice that there was one already. Does not seem to be a documented feature.

Is it an idea to also support it as a decorator?

[Jannis Leidel]

Yeah, it's not documented yet, it should probably be mentioned on ​https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/utils/#module-django.utils.translation

I don't see much use in a decorator since that'd be evaluated at import time, making the variable override useless.