Hello,
I’m using KDE Spin.
Background:
I’m doing KDE localization therefore I often manually test translation .mo files by generating and moving them to /usr/share/locale/[languacode]/[LC_MESSAGES].
I’m working on two machines and I had noticed that is seemed I did not get newer versions of those manually copied .mo files by updating the system (but I’m not fully sure about it).
So to get a clean state I tried to just remove all .mo files, update system, change back and forth the language from System Settings.
The problem:
Only a subset of the translations reappeared and often app translations did not. For example, if I completely remove an app (e.g., Konsole) and reinstall it, the app-specific translations seem to return, but other parts of the system remain partially translated or in English. I could manually remove and reinstall all of Plasma, but that seems extreme.
My Goal:
I want to restore the system to its default localization state—as if I had never manually copied any .mo files—so I can see what’s missing and how everything integrates. I’m aware I could regenerate the .mo files from source, but I’d like to avoid that for now.
(I’ve verified in a VM that this isn’t just a case of missing translations in the repositories.)