The LANGUAGE variable (GNU gettext utilities)
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2.3.3 Specifying a Priority List of Languages
Not all programs have translations for all languages. By default, an
English message is shown in place of a nonexistent translation. If you
understand other languages, you can set up a priority list of languages.
This is done through a different environment variable, called
LANGUAGE
. GNU
gettext
gives preference to
LANGUAGE
over
LC_ALL
and
LANG
for the purpose of message handling,
but you still need to have
LANG
(or
LC_ALL
) set to the primary
language; this is required by other parts of the system libraries.
For example, some Swedish users who would rather read translations in
German than English for when Swedish is not available, set
LANGUAGE
to ‘
sv:de
’ while leaving
LANG
to ‘
sv_SE
’.
Special advice for Norwegian users: The language code for Norwegian
bokmål changed from ‘
no
’ to ‘
nb
’ back in 2003.
Most of the message catalogs for this language are installed under ‘
nb
’.
But in order to also use the older ones installed under ‘
no
’, it is
recommended for Norwegian users to set
LANGUAGE
to ‘
nb:no
’.
In the
LANGUAGE
environment variable, but not in the other
environment variables, ‘
ll
CC
’ combinations can be
abbreviated as ‘
ll
’ to denote the language’s main dialect.
For example, ‘
de
’ is equivalent to ‘
de_DE
’ (German as spoken in
Germany), and ‘
pt
’ to ‘
pt_PT
’ (Portuguese as spoken in Portugal)
in this context.
Special advice for Chinese users:
Users who want to see translations with Simplified Chinese characters
should set
LANGUAGE
to
zh_CN
whereas users who want to see translations with Traditional Chinese characters
should set
LANGUAGE
to
zh_TW
Chinese users in Singapore will want to set it to
zh_SG:zh_CN
Chinese users in Hong Kong will want to set it to
zh_HK:zh_TW
and Chinese users in Macao will want to set it to
zh_MO:zh_TW
Here
zh_CN
or
zh_TW
, respectively, acts as fallback,
since only few packages have translations
for
zh_SG
zh_HK
, or
zh_MO
Note: The variable
LANGUAGE
is ignored if the locale is set to
’. In other words, you have to first enable localization, by setting
LANG
(or
LC_ALL
) to a value other than ‘
’, before you can
use a language priority list through the
LANGUAGE
variable.
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Locale Environment Variables
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Setting the Locale through Environment Variables
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