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As a user, if your language has been installed for this package, you
only have to set the LANG
environment variable to the appropriate
‘ll_CC’ combination. If you happen to have the LC_ALL
or some other LC_xxx
environment variables set, you should unset them
before setting LANG
, otherwise the setting of LANG
will not
have the desired effect. Here
For example, let’s suppose that you
speak German and live in Germany. At the shell prompt, merely execute
‘setenv LANG de_DE’ (in csh
),
‘export LANG; LANG=de_DE’ (in sh
) or
‘export LANG=de_DE’ (in bash
). This can be done from your
.login or .profile file, once and for all.
You might think that the country code specification is redundant. But in fact, some languages have dialects in different countries. For example, ‘de_AT’ is used for Austria, and ‘pt_BR’ for Brazil. The country code serves to distinguish the dialects.
The locale naming convention of ‘ll_CC’, with ‘ll’ denoting the language and ‘CC’ denoting the country, is the one use on systems based on GNU libc. On other systems, some variations of this scheme are used, such as ‘ll’ or ‘ll_CC.encoding’. You can get the list of locales supported by your system for your language by running the command ‘locale -a | grep '^ll'’.
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 LANG
for the purpose of message handling, but you still
need to have LANG
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’ recently (in 2003).
During the transition period, while some message catalogs for this language
are installed under ‘nb’ and some older ones under ‘no’, it’s
recommended for Norwegian users to set LANGUAGE
to ‘nb:no’ so that
both newer and older translations are used.
In the LANGUAGE
environment variable, but not in the LANG
environment variable, ‘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.
Next: Translating Teams, Previous: INSTALL Matters, Up: Notes on the Free Translation Project [Contents][Index]