Unexpected display language

Hi Rüdiger,

Thanks for your effort to improve Ubuntu by reporting this observation!

Actually it's not a bug, though. English (US) does only include 'translations' for a few packages with message strings where somebody has found it motivated to change the programs' English message strings to something more American.

By having German as the second language you tell the system to display messages in German if no English (US) translation is available. Since the program language is English, it makes no sense to have a non-English second language. If you just drag the German item downwards, log out, and log in again, you'll only see English messages.

If you click the "Help" button in Language Support, you find a help document that may further explain how it works.

On the other hand, Language Selector's UI is confusing. English (US) should inherently (and possibly invisibly) fall back to English since English (US) is such an incomplete translation. Probably the other English variations should as well.

I think we should reopen this bug.

Thanks Gunnar for the explanation, I see now where I misunderstood the GUI.

Jeremy as pretty much hit the point as to what my misunderstanding was. Let the paraphrase what my intention was choosing this setup. What I intended to say to Ubuntu was:

"Use the English language everywhere, and if there's a difference between UK and US English, please utilize the US variant. Only in the (very rare) cases, where there's *no English translation at all* available, among all other languages, chose the German translation."

Please tell me how I would indicate this choice with the existing GUI.

To phrase it the other way round: My expectation was that "English (US)" contains all the usual English strings, with only small variations where there's a difference between UK and US English.

It's not at all obvious that "English (US)" only contains the strings that differ from "English". The only way that this language set makes sense is to *always* chose "English" as the second language. And if this is so, the content of "English" could as well be included into "English (US)".

I believe that this should be changed (as Jeremy suggested).

On 2012-12-11 19:27, Rüdiger Kupper wrote:
> What I intended to say to Ubuntu was:
>
> "Use the English language everywhere, and if there's a difference
> between UK and US English, please utilize the US variant. Only in the
> (very rare) cases, where there's *no English translation at all*
> available, among all other languages, chose the German translation."
>
> Please tell me how I would indicate this choice with the existing GUI.

You can't. And it's not a GUI issue, really. The LANGUAGE environment variable is populated in accordance with the GUI, but the resulting display language is determined by gettext and the translations.

> To phrase it the other way round: My expectation was that "English (US)"
> contains all the usual English strings, with only small variations where
> there's a difference between UK and US English.

Well, as you know now, it doesn't.

I, too, like Jeremy's idea. Reopening the bug and changing the affected package (again).

Easier to fix it in language-selector, after all.

Thanks to Gunnar for pointing this bug to the place für fixing.
I still believe GNOME''s language selector is bound to be misunderstood.

On 2013-02-01 01:42, Rüdiger Kupper wrote:
> I still believe GNOME''s language selector is bound to be
> misunderstood.

The now proposed fix (see the linked merge proposal) is the best I can do without extensive changes. If it had been implemented previously, you wouldn't have filed this bug report, at least, would you? ;-)

This looks like a good solution, thanks!
Another possible change could be indicating in the language name that "English (US)" is not a full translation, but more like an "add-on" to "English". E.g., rename it to "Add-ons for English (US)".

On 2013-02-02 16:18, Rüdiger Kupper wrote:
> Another possible change could be indicating in the language name that
> "English (US)" is not a full translation, but more like an "add-on"
> to "English". E.g., rename it to "Add-ons for English (US)".

Thanks for the idea, but I for one do not jump at it. Actually I think it would cause more questions and confusion than it would prevent. ;-)

This bug was fixed in the package language-selector - 0.101

---------------
language-selector (0.101) raring; urgency=low

  * This upload is about fixing LP: #1043031. Namely the use of LANG guards
    introduced in 0.86 was possibly not an entirely correct solution because
    there is a significant class of users who do not use the 'native' locale
    of these fonts, yet this is what a LANG guards tests for. We need the
    fontconfig configurations to apply correctly in these cases too.
  * Remove Japanese fontconfig file; these have been moved to the individual
    font packages which will be pulled in by l-s if appropriate.
  * Switch to using .maintscript file for removing conffiles; version
    debhelper BD as appropriate.
  * 69_zh* - remove wqy-microhei versions. This package now has its own
    fontconfig configuration.
  * fontconfig/README: Update to reflect reality of the 69_* files
  * Remove 'strong' binding and unnecessary fonts from zh_* configuration.
 -- Iain Lane <email address hidden> Wed, 06 Feb 2013 15:37:33 +0000