How to temporarily change terminal display language to English?

Let’s say I am using Fedora Workstation, Gnome, all defaults.

When I am in gnome-terminal, error messages are in Chinese.

Sometimes, I want to post the errors to Forums in all English.

How can I temporary switch error message output to English in terminal, so that I can copy them out?

1 Like
7 Likes

Thank you very much!

    export LANGUAGE=en ; export LANG=en_EN  ;  bash   --help
1 Like

What is the difference between LANGUAGE and LANG?

Why we need both and their value (en / en_EN) are different?

frankly, I don’t care , but it works. maybe it is actually redundant and

LANGUAGE=en ;

is sufficient. quick to make work, anyways. if I remember right, the short version with 1 VARIABLE only leaves over some native-lingo stuff and the long ver. will make it completely english-only for some odd reason.

1 Like

LANG is the standard default setting for all locale categories, it can be overridden with LC_XXX for individual categories XXX. LANGUAGE is a GNU gettext extension which makes it possible to have an order of priority among languages you want for messages category specifically (LC_MESSAGES). See man 7 locale for further details.

In most cases where you want just one language, and for messages fall back to the built-in default (English in practice) when the language is not available, there is no need to set LANGUAGE.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.