How could I translate static data coming from JSon files in Django?

I have a json file with a long list of geographic locations

[
    {
        "id": 1,
        "name": "Afghanistan",
        "iso3": "AFG",
        "iso2": "AF",
        "phone_code": "93",
        "capital": "Kabul",
        "currency": "AFN",
        "currency_symbol": "؋",
        "tld": ".af",
        "native": "افغانستان",
        "region": "Asia",
        "subregion": "Southern Asia",
        "timezones": [
            {
                "zoneName": "Asia\/Kabul",
                "gmtOffset": 16200,
                "gmtOffsetName": "UTC+04:30",
                "abbreviation": "AFT",
                "tzName": "Afghanistan Time"
            }
        ],

        "latitude": "33.00000000",
        "longitude": "65.00000000",
        "emoji": "🇦🇫",
        "emojiU": "U+1F1E6 U+1F1EB",
        "states": [
            {
                "id": 3901,
                "name": "Badakhshan",
                "state_code": "BDS",
                "cities": [
                    {
                        "id": 52,
                        "name": "Ashkāsham",
                        "latitude": "36.68333000",
                        "longitude": "71.53333000"
                    },
        .......
        /* very long list */

This file is loaded in Django forms when country/state/city dropdown lists are needed.

The problem is that I want to translate at least the country names to other languages.

Even if I was allowed to use {% trans "Country_name" %} in my JSon file it wouldn't be very practical. Is there a faster way to do so? For example making this in forms.py doesn't work:

from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy as _
# ...

def get_country():
    filepath = 'myproj/static/data/countries_states_cities.json'
    all_data = readJson(filepath)

    all_countries = [('----', _("--- Select a Country ---"))]

    for x in all_data:
        y = (x['name'], _(x['name']))
        all_countries.append(y)

    return all_countries

"--- Select a Country ---" will be translated but x['name'] will not, because it seems that

django-admin makemessages -l fr

doesn't execute loops and doesn't not lookup into arrays.

In short I have the same problem that I would have if I had to translate data coming from a database.

For the database django_modeltranslation would be a solution. But how could I translate data coming from json files without have to manually edit the json file, wihch is extremely tedious and error prone?

Solution

You can customize the makemessages command to preprocess .json files.

# mysite/myapp/management/commands/makemessages.py

import os
import subprocess

from django.core.management.commands import makemessages


def templatize(path):
    return subprocess.check_output(["sed", "-E", f's/"name": "(.*)"/"name": _("\\1")/g', path]).decode()


class BuildFile(makemessages.BuildFile):

    def preprocess(self):
        if not self.is_templatized:
            return

        file_ext = os.path.splitext(self.translatable.file)[1]
        if file_ext == '.json':
            content = templatize(self.path)
            with open(self.work_path, 'w', encoding='utf-8') as fp:
                fp.write(content)
            return

        super().preprocess()


class Command(makemessages.Command):
    build_file_class = BuildFile

Usage:

python manage.py makemessages -l fr -e html,txt,py,json