How can I get the current language in Django?

How can I get the current language in the current thread in a model or in the admin?

Solution 1:

Functions of particular interest are django.utils.translation.get_language() which returns the language used in the current thread. See documentation.

Solution 2:

Or you can also get this in your views

request.LANGUAGE_CODE

Solution 3:

Be careful of the method you use to get the language. Depending on which method, Django will use different ways and informations to determine the right language to use.

When using the django.utils.translation.get_language() function, it's linked to the thread language. Before Django 1.8, it always returned settings.LANGUAGE_CODE when translations were disabled. If you want to manually override the thread language, you can use the override() or activate() functions, which is not very explicitly named, but well, still useful:

from django.utils import translation

with translation.override('fr'):
    print(_("Hello")) # <= will be translated inside the with block

translation.activate('fr') # <= will change the language for the whole thread.
# You then have to manually "restore" the language with another activate()
translation.activate('en') # <= change languages manually

If you want django to check the path and/or request (language cookie, ...), which is a lot more common e.g. www.example.com/en/<somepath> vs www.example.com/fr/<somepath>, use django.utils.translation.get_language_from_request(request, check_path=False). Also, it will always return a valid language set in settings.LANGUAGES

I found it not very easy to find these differences through Google about this subject so here it is for further reference.