Comments on: english locales

By: Jorg Willekens

Jorg Willekens — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:38:46 +0000

Why we use English? Mainly because for some of us, there is no “default language”. Too many are spoken a day: only today, I have already spoken 5 languages, which is pretty much what I do every day.

However, since I’ve been working with computers for so long and back in the day there was no option, English simply is *the choice* to operate a computer professionally.

I live in an environment where daily French and German is spoken and most companies I know have standardized on English. I think the main reason for that is that you’re supposed to know English in the first place and second: have you ever tried helping someone on the phone when you have a French version of the OS and the other side has a German version. I tell you it isn’t pretty.

The only places where I encounter translated operating systems are for home users (they have no choice and depending on the supermarket they buy their machine it might either be French or German.) or in small businesses where there is no centralised IT… meaning, they are essentially home computers used for a business.

English is the lingua franca of technology. If only I had an en_LU locale!
I think using anything else than english is blasphemy

(Note that I came here because my Debian box is set to en_US and I currently indeed have trouble with OpenOffice)

By: Dwayne Bailey

Dwayne Bailey — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 09:14:44 +0000

Personally I’m tired of getting Xhosa text marked as en_US. Plus I’m tired of en_US assumptions of my date requirements in some applications. I use en_ZA for my setup, since I made that locale I at least know it has everything correct.

I hold much higher hope that at least on FOSS platforms we stand more chance of getting people to use these features since we have the power to change things.

My frustration, certainly on Fedora is the limited ability to change this data. I can’t set a South African keyboard which is in X but not in system-config-keyboard. A user (I’m ignoring setting this up manually) can’t specify fallback languages. Our difficulty to be able to easily configure these things is I think the real frustration, the platform has all the abilities.

By: Frank Daley

Frank Daley — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 01:40:07 +0000

I’m in Australia and even though I select Australia and Sydney as my location during a Fedora anaconda install, the installation still defaults to set the locale as en_US.

I then have to manually change it to en_AU and then OO.o changes its defaults to A4 and metric. However, I would have thought it would be much nicer if it did this by default.

By: troll

troll — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:30:01 +0000

Many more educated people talking natively other languages prefer English with their problems because a) If you get an error message you can actually Google for it and find something worthwhile b) Yes those translation are plain shit c) It’s good language practice d) Many environments (corporate) use English for the official communications anyways even though most of the people doesn’t speak English natively.

TBH the translations should be removed from applications altogether.

By: blah

blah — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:26:45 +0000

Set LANG=de_DE and LC_MESSAGES=C and you get the best behaviour if you are German. This will set messages to english but everything else (paper, currency, …) to the proper german settings.

By: Dieter Spahn

Dieter Spahn — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:17:27 +0000

Caolan,

I am a German and use always the en_US locales (because the German translations for applications and GNOME are so incomplete in my opinion). Then, for example, to get the A4 paper size or the EURO curreny I install the OpenOffice German language package (de) and configure OO accordingly.

Regards
Dieter

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:27:01 +0000

red,
en_GB doesn’t share the same translation as en_US, but the differences aren’t that great – it retains a few unique spellings, nothing that (I hope) you couldn’t handle.
en_IE similarly derives from en_GB, but again, can contain differences.

By: red

red — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:33:31 +0000

I do use en_US and I had problems with letter instead of A4 in the past. I’m not sure about the inches, though. It’s a real pain in the ass and en_GB might be a good way out (en_IE being no better for me). Does en_GB have the same “translation” as en_US or is it really british english? Would be a reason against en_GB for me personally.

Thanks for the hint, anyway.

By: Miloslav Trmac

Miloslav Trmac — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:30:05 +0000

The clean solution is to set LC_PAPER to a local locale, and LC_MESSAGES (or LC_COLLATE, or LANG, whatever the user wants) to en_US.UTF-8.

Unfortunately the extended locale standard specifying LC_PAPER did not become a part of POSIX – but it still can be used in Linux.