Migrating from django-modeltranslation¶

This is how to migrate from django-modeltranslation (version 0.12.1) to django-modeltrans:

Make sure you have a recent backup available!
Add modeltrans to your INSTALLED_APPS

Add the TranslationField to the models you want to translate and keep the registrations for now. In order to prevent field name collisions, disable the virtual fields in django-modeltrans for now (virtual_fields=False):

# models.py
from django.db import models
from modeltrans.fields import TranslationField

class Blog(models.Model):
    title = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    body = models.TextField(null=True)

    # add this field, containing the TranslationOptions attributes as arguments:
    i18n = TranslationField(fields=('title', 'body'), virtual_fields=False)


# translation.py
from modeltranslation.translator import translator, TranslationOptions
from .models import Blog

class BlogTranslationOptions(TranslationOptions):
    fields = ('name', 'title', )

translator.register(Blog, BlogTranslationOptions)

Run ./manage.py makemigrations. This will create the migration adding the i18n-fields required by django-modeltrans. Apply them with /manage.py migrate
We need to create a migration to copy the values of the translated fields into the newly created i18n-field. django-modeltrans provides a management command to do that ./manage.py i18n_makemigrations
Now, remove django-modeltranslation by: - Remove modeltranslation from INSTALLED_APPS. - Remove all translation.py files from your apps. - Remove the use of modeltranslation.admin.TranslationAdmin in your admin.py’s
Run ./manage.py makemigrations. This will remove the translated fields from your registered models.
Update your code: use the <field>_i18n field in places where you would use <field> with django-modeltranslation. Less magic, but explicit is better than implicit!