django-i18n-fields: Multilingual Model Fields for Django

I ran multilingual content on django-localized-fields in production for a long time, but its hard PostgreSQL/HStore dependency and maintenance situation eventually pushed me to build a replacement: django-i18n-fields. The API is intentionally similar, so migrating is straightforward.

Table of contents

What makes it different

• Database agnostic — uses Django’s built-in JSONField instead of PostgreSQL’s HStore, so it works with PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, or anything Django supports. No database extensions needed.
• DRF support — ships with LocalizedModelSerializer and serializer fields that automatically return values in the active language.
• Full type hints — strict pyright and mypy checking; your IDE actually understands the localized fields.
• Clean admin UI — tab and dropdown modes for switching languages out of the box.
• All the field types — CharField, TextField, IntegerField, FloatField, BooleanField, FileField, UniqueSlugField, and even a MartorField for Markdown editing.
• Modern versions — Django 5.0+ and 6.0, Python 3.10+.

Quick example

# models.py
from i18n_fields import LocalizedCharField, LocalizedTextField

class Article(models.Model):
    title = LocalizedCharField(max_length=200, required=['en'])
    content = LocalizedTextField(blank=True)

# Usage
article = Article.objects.create(
    title={'en': 'Hello World', 'es': 'Hola Mundo'},
    content={'en': 'Content here', 'es': 'Contenido aqui'},
)

# Automatically uses the active language
print(article.title)  # "Hello World"

# Query by language
Article.objects.filter(title__en='Hello World')
Article.objects.order_by(L('title'))

And DRF just works:

from i18n_fields.drf import LocalizedModelSerializer

class ArticleSerializer(LocalizedModelSerializer):
    class Meta:
        model = Article
        fields = ['id', 'title', 'content']

# Returns: {"id": 1, "title": "Hello World", "content": "Content here"}

What’s next

Built-in translation services — Google Translate or LLM-based auto-translation (Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude) for your records.

Links

• GitHub: huynguyengl99/django-i18n-fields
• Docs: django-i18n-fields.readthedocs.io
• PyPI: django-i18n-fields

I’ve been running this in production since migrating off django-localized-fields. Feedback and contributions welcome.