2.4 Localizing

a2ps provides some Native Language Support, that is speaking your mother tongue. It uses three special features for non-English languages:

the tongue

i.e., the language used by the interface,

the date

i.e., the format and the words used in the language to specify a date.

To enable these features, properly set your environment variable LANG (see the documentation of your system, for instance ‘man locale’, ‘man environ’ etc.).

The problem with this approach is that a lot more than just messages and time information is affected: especially the way numbers are written changes, what may cause problems with awk and such.

So if you just want messages and time format to be localized, then define:

set LC_MESSAGES=fr ; export LC_MESSAGES
set LC_TIME=fr     ; export LC_TIME