File: gettext.info,  Node: The LANGUAGE variable,  Prev: Locale Environment Variables,  Up: Setting the POSIX Locale

2.3.3 Specifying a Priority List of Languages
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   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 ‘LC_ALL’
and ‘LANG’ for the purpose of message handling, but you still need to
have ‘LANG’ (or ‘LC_ALL’) 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’ back in 2003.  Most of the message
catalogs for this language are installed under ‘nb’.  But in order to
also use the older ones installed under ‘no’, it is recommended for
Norwegian users to set ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘nb:no’.

   In the ‘LANGUAGE’ environment variable, but not in the other
environment variables, ‘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.

   Special advice for Chinese users: Users who want to see translations
with Simplified Chinese characters should set ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘zh_CN’,
whereas users who want to see translations with Traditional Chinese
characters should set ‘LANGUAGE’ to ‘zh_TW’.  Chinese users in Singapore
will want to set it to ‘zh_SG:zh_CN’, Chinese users in Hong Kong will
want to set it to ‘zh_HK:zh_TW’, and Chinese users in Macao will want to
set it to ‘zh_MO:zh_TW’.  Here ‘zh_CN’ or ‘zh_TW’, respectively, acts as
fallback, since only few packages have translations for ‘zh_SG’,
‘zh_HK’, or ‘zh_MO’.

   Note: The variable ‘LANGUAGE’ is ignored if the locale is set to ‘C’.
In other words, you have to first enable localization, by setting ‘LANG’
(or ‘LC_ALL’) to a value other than ‘C’, before you can use a language
priority list through the ‘LANGUAGE’ variable.