Localization and translation issue #3470

According to output of bitcoin-qt --help, the default language, if none is specified with --lang is the "system locale". On my Linux Mint system text erroneously is translated into swedish. It is not in any other program I've ran so far. Here is my output from running locale:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TIME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_NAME=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=sv_SE.UTF-8
LC_ALL=

You have quite some stuff that contains SE, which means it is swedish.

Yes that's true. But time format, numeric presentation, currency or something else but LANG and LC_MESSAGES should not affect the language of messages or UI inside an application.

The point of having multiple locale environment variables is so a user can choose to have numbers written in one format, and the text in another. Or print something in the standard paper size of their current residence, but read their native language.

Taken straight from Debian's locale manpage:

       LC_CTYPE

               Character classification and case conversion.

       LC_COLLATE

               Collation order.

       LC_TIME

               Date and time formats.

       LC_NUMERIC

               Non-monetary numeric formats.

       LC_MONETARY

               Monetary formats.

       LC_MESSAGES

               Formats of informative and diagnostic messages and
               interactive responses.

       LC_PAPER

               Paper size.

       LC_NAME

               Name formats.

       LC_ADDRESS

               Address formats and location information.

       LC_TELEPHONE

               Telephone number formats.

       LC_MEASUREMENT

               Measurement units (Metric or Other).

       LC_IDENTIFICATION

               Metadata about the locale information.

@jacwah There is a QLocale::System().uiLanguages() since Qt 4.8 which may be interesting to use instead of QLocale::System().name() for newer Qt versions. I encourage experimentation by people that use different locales.

If that doesn't work, you probably need to file this issue upstream with the Qt project. We make no use of such environment variables directly but rely on Qt's view of the locale for example for date formatting and to find the language.

@laanwj From the Qt docs on QLocale::System().uiLanguages():

"Most like you do not need to use this function directly, but just pass the QLocale object to the QTranslator::load() function."

This is not how the current implementation does it. I'll try to experiment, but don't count on me since I'm not really a C++ or Qt developer.

I've looked at the code in initTranslations in qt/bitcoin.cpp and reading the Qt docs, but this is not my field. Someone who knows this stuff should have a look at it.

@jacwah does this issue persist?

@Leviathn It was a long time I reported this, and I don't have the original system any more (nor any other Linux box. I don't know.