Hello, I am located in Oslo, Norway; Norwegian is my native language. Unfortunately, Norwegian ‘computer language’ is based on more or less precise translations from English, so my primary language setting in Leap 15 is English. Since I have spent some 13 years in Germany, Norwegian and German are set as secondary languages. YAST obviously tries to compete at the same level: Under “Nettverkstjenester” (Network Services) i find "Create New Kerberos Server, “Vertsnavn” (Hostname in Norwegian), “LDAP- und Kerberos-Client” (English and German), “E-post Server” (Norwegian and English), “NFS-klient” (Norwegian), “NIS-Client” (English), “NTP-Konfiguration” (etc. | osv. | usw.). I can live with the ‘problem’, but it is conceivable that it is not limited to YAST.
Which is, AFAICS, one of the largest advantages of Open Source systems:
There are usually talented “local language” professionals who are prepared to contribute their translated text with a high quality to the respective Open Source projects.
WRT your YaST language issue, the following may be a good way to influence the Norwegian translation:
Submit a Bug Report against YaST with your suggested improvements.
Through the contacts you’ll notice while the issue addressed by your Bug Report is being worked, suggest that you be admitted to the group who maintain the Norwegian translation …
I have installed English as the primary language and Norwegian plus German as secondary languages utilizing YAST. In the YAST menues i find 25 items in Norwegian, 6 in English, 17 in German, and several mixed (e.g. Brukerstøtte (‘User Support’ heading), 'Unterstutzung (line below heading)). Note: This is in one session. Doing a Shutdown changes nothing.
I see that you are describing a problem when you have multiple languages configured, not that translations are necessarily missing.
Unfortunately for myself, I don’t have multiple languages configured for my daily work, so haven’t tried to configure your setting, my limited experience in the past has been to configure only one additional language and switch between the two.
If no one can provide an answer here, then I’d suggest submitting a bug report describing our problem.
OK, I think your point is that the confusion may happen when translations are missing. I have chosen American English as my primary language utilizing YAST. In my case, it results in Norwegian becoming the dominant language in YAST. When I hover over “Nettverksinstillinger”, a line underneath apears, it reads ‘Configure network cards,hostname and routing’, could it be that the missing blank (… cards,hostname …) triggers the switch from Norwegian to English because the spelling in English is not correct? And why do I find “LDAP- und Kerberos-Client” as a topic, is it because there are missing translations of “Client” into German (Client is ‘Klient’ in German, ‘klient’ in Norwegian)? A theory might be that missing blanks causes confusion, since in “Administrasjon av brukere og grupper” when hovering, I find the sub-line ‘Add,Edit,Delete Users or User Groups’; may this cause that most of the items listed in YAST are in Norwegian (secondary language) and not in American English (primary language)? I would also like to mention that switching to UK-English makes no difference.
Concluding with a conspiracy theory (very popular thing in these days): Might it be the Google Translation Service and/or the Location Service acting behind the scenes?
Short version of all above: I think there is a programming bug at play.
If the parameter “LANGUAGE” needs to be used used at a system level then, the paramter “LANG” needs to be defined on a new line …
Please use either YaST or “localectl” to setup ‘/etc/locale.conf’ …
I have absolutely no idea as to why a “G_???” variable definition should be included in ‘/etc/locale.conf’:
It ain’t listed in the list of valid parameters of the “locale.conf” man (5) page.
It’s a GTK parameter; meaning that, it has absolutely nothing to do with Linux System Parameters …
Due to it being a GTK parameter, it’s only valid within a user’s GTK session or application – GNOME, Firefox, LibreOffice …
Answers:
For the case of openSUSE Leap 15.0, there’re only 3 “very British” locales: en_GB; en_GB.iso885915; en_GB.utf8.
Copy ‘/etc/skel/.profile’ to ‘/root/’ and edit it.
Only for the case of either a GTK session (GNOME) or a GTK application (Firefox, LibreOffice, … ).
Please note that, the ISO 3166-1 definition of “UK” is defined only for the case of exceptions and, it’s ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 – Linux is not included in the list of exceptions …
To examine the list of valid English Locales use either “localectl list-locales | grep ‘en_’” or “locale -a | grep ‘en_’”.
Proposed changes effectuated. YAST has still only two types of English available in main menu, English (UK) and English (US). And YAST still has a language mix in the menus (I have not checked if it is the same mix as before). Concerning LANG and LANGUAGE: What you characterized as wrong was generated by Leap 15; however, I have removed it for testing purposes.
In any case: Thanks for your efforts and have a nice weekend!
Jan Christian
Same here – and, I only have “yast2-trans-en” installed and, there’s only “yast2-trans-en_GB” and “yast2-trans-en_US” available as additional translations …
I suspect that, we can safely assume that, “English (UK)” will install the “en_GB” Locale.
As far as YaST is concerned, it seems that the other English language Locales (Antigua and Barbados; Australia, Botswana, Canada, Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Israel, India, Nigeria, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe) are not considered to be necessary …
The same can be said for the various German language Locales …
Then, there is a language priority issue within YaST itself and with the “yast2-trans-nb” and “yast2-trans-nn” packages – a Bug Report is needed.
I’ve checked with setting the System Language with YaST and setting it with ‘localectl’:
Setting the secondary System Language with YaST only resulted in various en_GB Language Packs being installed and, the list of installed languages used by YaST being set to INSTALLED_LANGUAGES=“en_GB,de_DE” …
With the following CLI command, ‘/etc/locale.conf’ is now as follows:
Setting the secondary System Language via YaST doesn’t setup ‘/etc/locale.conf’ – possibly a Bug Report is needed …
Setting the secondary System Language via ‘localectl’ modifies ‘/etc/locale.conf’ as expected – one line per parameter and no comma between parameter definitions …
After resetting this system to “de_DE.UTF-8” with no secondary System Language, I checked YaST – guess what:
The following Control Centre entries are in English – despite the language of the settings modules themselves being German: “Software-Repositories”; “Create New Directory Server”; “Create New Kerberos Server”; “FTP-Server”; “User Logon Management”.
The following Control Centre entries are in German but, the comment is English: “Datum und Zeit”; “Netzwerkeinstellungen”; “Partitionierer”.
Trial and error is poor heuristics when dealing with locale. RTFM definitely works better.
Most programs adhere to what they are told in locale.conf. Whenever yast2 language doesn’t adhere to man locale, kill its contributions to locale.conf.
I think your conclusion is wrong. With en_GB as primary language setting, I get a mix of languages. However, take a look at the comments for your Control Centre entities, they have language that is gibberish: What are the translations for ‘zone,date,and’, ‘cards,hostname’, and ‘RAID,LVM,and’, these three words are not in any dictionary, I suppose. Or - in other words - is a piece of software for text interpretation having to dealing with a that is being used as a thousands separator, a decimal comma, a literal comma and potentially other things, capable of interpreting the word ‘zone,date,and’ correctly? My conclusion would be that there may be more than one reason for the YaST behaviour.
