Another option would be to route ALL _ () calls through utils.translation, with a second parameter--translation type / priority.  This would allow us to progressively mark strings to translate.  I can think of three levels: distributed server user-facing, distributed server admin-facing, and central server.  The current level of translation strings could be set in settings.py.

Another reason to favor that option is, it might generalize well to other offline apps besides kalite.  And, by default, a translation string could receive the highest priority--so in many cases, no parameter would be necessary.

Let me know if that's too complicated.  I would still prefer importing a function from utils.translation, with no extra optional parameter, for doing the dummy pass-through function, as I think it makes the developer's job easier in the future (more agnostic to the meaning of that function).