Ubuntu – Some menus are in Chinese/Japanese!

languagelocale

Yesterday I shutdown my computer and today when I powered it on and logged in to 12.04, certain strings are in Japanese/Chinese (I don't know how to differentiate between the two). The strings are:

Applications, places menu selector in my panel.
Under 'places', the 'Home folder', 'Desktop', 'Computer'.
The menus in VLC!
Certain applications like 'sound converter', etc.

How can I change everything back to English?

I'm using Gnome classic in Ubuntu 12.04.

Best Answer

Edit /etc/default/locale:
```
LANG="en_US"

LANGUAGE="en_US:en"
```
Edit ~/.pam_environment:
```
LANG=en_US

Language=en_US
```

Log out and log in, or reboot.

Root cause:

When we add language via System Settings > Regional Settings, it is added as KDE Plasma's (Desktop Environment's) Language and not System Language. Hence, though System Language shows English (run locale in terminal), we still see our desktop in the language specified in Regional Settings.

This is also the reason why using

sudo locale-gen en_US.UTF-8 or
sudo localectl set-locale LANG=en_US.utf8 or
Putting export LANG=en_US.utf8 in ~/.bashrc and running source ~/.bashrc

doesn't effect the language setting set in Regional Setting.

Solution:

Go to ~/.config/plasma-locale-settings.sh, open it and ensure it contains following:

# Generated script, do not edit
# Exports language-format specific env vars from startkde.
# This script has been generated from kcmshell5 formats.
# It will automatically be overwritten from there.
# I am from India, hence en_IN, shouldn't matter much
export LANG=en_IN
export LANGUAGE=en_US

then, go to ~/.config/plasma-localerc, open it and ensure it contains following:

[Formats]
LANG=en_IN

[Translations]
LANGUAGE=en_US

Shutdown the computer and start again. You should be back on English. If not, do let me know by comment :)

Best Answer

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