diff --git a/conf/locale/config.yaml b/conf/locale/config.yaml
index af8092483800..6faf3188be1f 100644
--- a/conf/locale/config.yaml
+++ b/conf/locale/config.yaml
@@ -44,6 +44,8 @@ ignore_dirs:
     - src/pystache-custom
     - src/rate-xblock
     - src/xblock-google-drive
+    # Ignore the file we use when translations are not setup in development environments.
+    - common/static/js/src/gettext_fallback.js
 
 
 # Third-party installed apps that we also extract strings from.  When adding a
diff --git a/conf/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/.gitignore b/conf/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/.gitignore
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..e87daf6de8a3
--- /dev/null
+++ b/conf/locale/en/LC_MESSAGES/.gitignore
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
+# We want to ignore files in this directory which we do in the
+# top-level .gitignore file but we still want this directory to
+# be automatically created.