Custom translation in edx-ora2 not updating after rebuilding in production (Tutor Sumac)

Development
, ,
1

We’re using the openedx-translations repository to add and override custom translations for our Open edX (Sumac) platform, deployed via Tutor.

Everything works as expected for most components — our custom strings appear correctly in production.

However, we recently tried to change a label in edx-ora2 (Open Response Assessment).
Here’s what we did:

  1. Added the updated translation in the openedx-translations repo under the correct locale and component (edx-ora2).

  2. Rebuilt the image using Tutor.

  3. Verified that other translation updates applied correctly, but the change in edx-ora2 did not appear in the UI.

We’d like to know:

  • Does edx-ora2 handle translations differently from other components?

  • What’s the best way to test translation changes locally (dev ) before deploying them to production in Tutor?

    1. MFE-based translations (React frontends using .json).

    2. Django-based translations (backend .po).

2

I think all repos handle translations via Atlas. Maybe @omar can help you. But first have you searched the forums? There have been a lot of recent posts on custom translations.

1 Like
3

@Yagnesh for a single label in a single it doesn’t warrant a fork or custom translations.

The best way we found for that is to shove those translations in the theme files: Settings — edx-platform documentation

Custom translations is very advanced and only made sense for me in a single case where we needed to replace a huge ton of words that’s not compatible with upstream.

In your case, please know that xblocks and edx-platform share the same gettext resources, so you can use the theme to put custom translations and you’ll be fine.

  1. Verified that other translation updates applied correctly, but the change in edx-ora2 did not appear in the UI.

This can have many reaonons, one of them is that the _(““) text is different than the po file. Make sure it’s the exact same string, inluding spaces and new lines. Any minor difference will cause gettext to think it’s another string.

4

@omar in production, we already use the Open edX translation repo, and we have done many custom translations in edx-platform And MFEs—everything worked fine. However, when we applied the same method to this repository, it didn’t work. So my question is specifically related to edx-ora2.