Localization

Since version 4.1 the labels that describe the information are translatable.

Limitation

Internal messages or exceptions are not translatable, the internationalization is limited to the “tags” returned by the getAsXML and asXML methods of the Movie, Person, Character, or Company classes.

Beware that in many cases these “tags” are not the same as the “keys” used to access information in the same class. For example, you can translate the tag “long-imdb-name” -the tag returned by the call person.getAsXML('long imdb name'), but not the key “long imdb name” itself. To translate keys, you can use the helpers.translateKey function.

If you want to add i18n to your Cinemagoer-based application, all you need to do is to switch to the imdbpy text domain:

>>> import os
>>> os.environ['LANG'] = 'it_IT'
>>> from imdb.locale import _
>>> _('art-department')
'Dipartimento artistico'

If you want to translate Cinemagoer into another language, see the How to translate document for instructions.

Articles in titles

To convert a title to its canonical format as in “Title, The”, Cinemagoer makes some assumptions about what is an article and what isn’t, and this can lead to some wrong canonical titles. For example, it can canonicalize the title “Die Hard” as “Hard, Die” because it guesses “Die” as an article (and it is, in Germany…).

To solve this problem, there are other keys: “smart canonical title”, “smart long imdb canonical title”, “smart canonical series title”, “smart canonical episode title” which can be used to do a better job converting a title into its canonical format.

This works, but it needs to know about articles in various languages: if you want to help, see the linguistics.LANG_ARTICLES and linguistics.LANG_COUNTRIES dictionaries.

To guess the language of a movie title, call its ‘guessLanguage’ method (it will return None, if unable to guess). If you want to force a given language instead of the guessed one, you can call its ‘smartCanonicalTitle’ method, setting the ‘lang’ argument appropriately.

Alternative titles

Sometimes it’s useful to manage a title’s alternatives (AKAs) knowing their languages. In the ‘helpers’ module there are some (hopefully) useful functions:

  • akasLanguages(movie) - Given a movie, return a list of tuples in (lang, AKA) format (lang can be None, if unable to detect).

  • sortAKAsBySimilarity(movie, title) - Sort the AKAs on a movie considering how much they are similar to a given title (see the code for more options).

  • getAKAsInLanguage(movie, lang) - Return a list of AKAs of the movie in the given language (see the code for more options).