レナート   Wunschkonzert, Ponyhof und Abenteuerspielplatz   ﻟﻴﻨﺎﺭﺕ

Posted by Robert at Fri Apr 11 01:22:12 2008
looks like the problem is the Fedora script used to launch firefox, it does check that the language extension is installed using the LANG. That script is RH specific, I removed the offending line and let firefox select the language by itself,

With LANG=ja_JP I saw the UI in Japanese., with both LC_MESSAGES=en_US LANG=ja_JP everything was shown on English

Posted by Johannes at Fri Apr 11 01:32:01 2008
Well, I don't care much how you want to use the UI, but if you call german translation (for GNOME, not firefox) mediocre, where are your bug reports?

Posted by ethana2 at Fri Apr 11 02:03:08 2008
How many bug reports is he supposed to have?

Firefox having weird localization issues doesn't really surprise me though...
I don't know if I'd consider it a proper gnome app just yet... SCIM input doesn't show up in my context menus and such like that....

Posted by Tobias at Fri Apr 11 02:18:56 2008
Perhaps they are necessarily mediocre, because either you have to use horrible denglish all over the place or make up awkward German terms ad-hoc.

Example: Wired Network
1. Kabelnetzwerk?
2. Ethernet?
3.

Posted by Victor Bogado'' at Fri Apr 11 04:19:33 2008
I feel exactly the same way, translations to Portuguese, my native language, aways sound weird or mediocre. Not because they are really like that, simply because I'm so much more used to read the english version that the translated words simply don't work.

I am glad I now know how to fix this for at least a good part of the applications. Thanks, I didn't know about "$LC_MESSAGES". :-)

Posted by Simon at Fri Apr 11 11:35:41 2008
There are two ways (single-line commands) to solve the problem, but my German are too mediocre to explain.

Posted by Marko Macek at Fri Apr 11 20:24:42 2008
+1 (strongly agrreed)

I'll always prefer US-English software to one in my native language.

I suspect many software developers will.

Posted by Stoffe at Fri Apr 11 22:12:20 2008
The Swedish translations are worse than mediocre. Most of it sound like they have gone via babelfish word by word with no context at all (GNOME, Ubuntu at least). Sadly the translators teams for both are hijacked by a few individuals that thinks that if highly technical, made up swenglish terms were fine in basements in the old DOS 6.2 times, the same general approach should work on everyday people now too. Reasoning is equally futile - the words are obvious, can't you see?

That said, the whole locale/language thingy is pretty broken as is, at least in GNOME. It makes way too many assumptions based on what language I selected (calendar start of week day!!! Insane!) with no way to change it even in config files. There's some correlation but no actual relation between language preferred (often English, of course) and where people currently live, work and interact with the surroundings. Yet almost everything is decided by language choice. Weird.

Posted by Juri Pakaste at Sat Apr 12 16:43:58 2008
Yeah. I'm not going to diss the Finnish translations here because I've never even given them a chance, I just prefer to have my software give out the messages in en_US. That's the way it was probably originally written, I understand it well enough and that's what I'm used to.

And I want the week to start on Monday. And all the rest of the Finnish cultural assumptions.

I hate it that it's so hard to get it right. If I try to set LANG to fi_FI.UTF-8 and LC_MESSAGES to C or en_US.UTF-8, Firefox and man are not the only problem cases. Date speaks Finnish to me and so does cal. I haven't tried to actually run a session with those settings.

In my previous workplace when I had a Linux laptop, I had managed to find a usable set of locales to make it mostly ok - I think I had to set some of them to point to Ireland or Australia or something. I've never quite gathered up the energy to experiment on my own Linux box, I've just grown to accept the fact that there are various things slightly wrong.

The GNOME panel calendar used to have a setting for the start of the week back years and years ago, but that's one of those options that was cut. Oh well.