On Tue, Jun 07, 2005 at 10:30:16PM +0200, Denis Barbier wrote: > Basically the LANGUAGE variable is a GNU extension to allow displaying > messages in several languages, so that untranslated messages for your > favorite language can be displayed with other languages than English. > This is not a replacement for LANG; your environment must be setup > correctly to display translated messages (which means that LC_MESSAGES > and LC_CTYPE must be set and have compatible values). > E.g. debian-installer sets > LANG=nn_NO > LANGUAGE=nn_NO:nn:no_NO:no:nb_NO:nb:da:sv:en_GB:en > when Norwegian Nynorsk is selected, because Norwegian translators > believed that most Norwegian users will prefer Danish or Swedish over > English. This is fine because all these locales have the same > ISO-8859-1 encoding. > Now compare > $ env - LANG=ja_JP LANGUAGE=de_DE cat -h > cat: Ung«ältige Option -- h > ,,cat --help¡È gibt weitere Informationen. > $ env - LANG=fr_FR LANGUAGE=de_DE cat -h > cat: Ungültige Option -- h > ,,cat --help" gibt weitere Informationen. > The latter works as expected, but the former does not because of encoding > mismatch. In order to avoid such problems, LANGUAGE variable should almost > be set under UTF-8 locales only. You can check that the some command > with LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 works fine. > > When LC_MESSAGES and LC_CTYPE are correctly set, LANGUAGE can contain a > list of locale components, and gettext will check in turn all these message > catalogs and return the first translation of this msgid. In fact, the > initial example could be shortened to > LANGUAGE=nn_NO:no_NO:nb_NO:da:sv:en_GB > because message catalogs are also searched in xx after xx_XX.
Yes, I realize all this now. The bug is that I can't figure _any_ of this out from the manual. -- Daniel Jacobowitz CodeSourcery, LLC -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
