django-chinese-doc: A Community Chinese Translation of the Django 1.10 Documentation

What django-chinese-doc Is and Who It Was For

django-chinese-doc is a documentation translation project, not a code library. It contains Sphinx-format reStructuredText files that are Chinese translations of the official Django 1.10 documentation. The README invites contributors to fork the repository and submit translations, indicating this was a community-driven effort.

The primary audience was Chinese-speaking Django developers who needed documentation in their native language for the 1.10 release. The ReadTheDocs site at http://django-chinese-doc.readthedocs.io/zh_CN/latest/ served as the published destination. The README note that the documentation includes everything you need to know about Django ("你想知道的关于Django的一切").

Repository Layout and How to Access the Documentation

The repository uses the standard Sphinx project layout. The top-level directory contains a Makefile, a make.bat for Windows builds, a requirements.txt with the Sphinx dependencies, a source/ directory holding the translated reStructuredText files, and a .readthedocs.yaml configuration file for the ReadTheDocs service.

The source/ directory is where the translated .rst files live. The Sphinx configuration is at source/conf.py. To browse the documentation without building it locally, the ReadTheDocs-hosted version at http://django-chinese-doc.readthedocs.io/zh_CN/latest/ is the intended access point.

The README organises the translated content into four types of documentation: getting-started tutorials (step-by-step guides for building a web application from scratch), topic guides (higher-level discussions of concepts), reference guides (API and technical reference), and how-to guides (solutions to specific problems).

Building the Documentation Locally

The requirements.txt lists two dependencies:

sphinx_rtd_theme==0.2.4
docutils==0.17.1

With those installed, the Makefile provides the standard Sphinx build targets. To build HTML documentation:

make html

The Makefile calls `python -msphinx -M html source build` with any options passed via SPHINXOPTS. The built HTML output goes to build/html/. For a list of available output formats (PDF, epub, man pages):

make help

The Sphinx project name is django-chinese-docs and the source directory is source/. The Makefile was generated for Python 3 (using python -msphinx rather than sphinx-build directly).

Coverage: What Was Translated and What Was Not

The README uses completion percentages for individual documentation sections. The getting-started tutorial and much of the model layer, view layer, and template layer were translated. However, the README marks several sections at 0% translation, falling back to links to the original English Django documentation at docs.djangoproject.com:

Migrations (both the overview and the operations reference), database transactions, custom lookups, PostgreSQL-specific features, and several other advanced topics had not been translated as of the last activity in 2021.

This means a developer using django-chinese-doc would find Chinese translations for the core framework concepts but would be redirected to English content for migrations documentation, which is one of the most commonly referenced sections of the Django documentation in day-to-day development. The model layer reference guide for QuerySet methods, the view layer URLconfs, and the class-based views documentation were translated.

Limitations: Django 1.10 Only and No Recent Updates

The current version documented is Django 1.10, which was released in August 2016 and reached end-of-life in December 2017. Since then, Django has released versions 2.0 through 5.x with substantial changes to the ORM, the URL routing system, middleware, the forms framework, and the admin interface.

Any content in django-chinese-doc about API behaviour, class signatures, or configuration keys may differ from current Django versions. Django's type annotation support, async views, and the changes to the url() and path() functions are all post-1.10 and are not covered here.

The last push to the repository was on 2021-10-29, more than five years before the current date. No releases have been tagged. The Sphinx dependency pinning to sphinx_rtd_theme 0.2.4 and docutils 0.17.1 is also outdated; building with newer versions of these libraries may require configuration adjustments.

Comparison with the Official Django Chinese Translation

The Django project itself maintains official translations of its documentation at docs.djangoproject.com. The Chinese translation is maintained by the Django community as part of the django-docs-translations effort and tracks the current stable Django release.

The key difference is currency: the official translation tracks the same Django version as the main documentation. django-chinese-doc is frozen at 1.10. The official translation may have less complete coverage of some sections, but what is translated is accurate for the current Django API.

For a developer starting a new Django project in 2026, using the official documentation or its official translation is the correct starting point. django-chinese-doc remains useful only if you are specifically working with a Django 1.10 codebase, which is an uncommon scenario given that version's age.

Contributing and Licence Status

The README invites contributors to fork the repository and submit pull requests with translated content. No licence is declared in the repository metadata. The project is a derivative work of the Django documentation; the Django documentation is published under the BSD licence, and any derivative translation would be subject to the same terms.

The .readthedocs.yaml file and the Makefile are standard project scaffolding. Contributors would need to edit files in the source/ directory and rebuild with make html to verify their changes before submitting a pull request.

Editorial conclusion

django-chinese-doc is useful only as a historical reference for Django 1.10 and is not suitable for developers building new projects on Django 2.x or later. Django 1.10 reached end-of-life in 2017 and has no security support. For current Chinese-language Django documentation, the official Django project maintains translations hosted at docs.djangoproject.com and linked from the official site. Before using this repository, verify that your target Django version matches 1.10, and check which sections were listed at 0% translation since those link back to the untranslated English originals.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official documentation
2. Official README
3. Project repository