GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 780784
Limited or non-existent English UI when using a system language list with English and non-English components
Last modified: 2018-05-24 17:39:20 UTC
When setting a list of system languages where the first are English variants and the last are non-English having a GIMP translation makes GIMP show completely or partially in non-English when set to use the system language. Steps to reproduce: 1. Make sure that the choice of GIMP interface language is the system language (e.g. by launching the program and setting the configuration from the Preferences dialogue) 2. In the Language & Region section of the System Preferences select two preferred languages: a. As the first (primary) language choose some variant of English (tested offenders, worst offenders first: "English", "English (U.S.)", "English (Canada)", "English (U.K.)") b. As the second language place a non-English one with a (reasonably complete) GIMP translation one (e.g. "Español", "Français", "Português (Portugal)") 3. Launch GIMP Expected results: GIMP should show up completely in English. Actual results: Non-English elements appear to varying degrees: * In the case of "English" and "English (U.S.)" nothing seems to be in English. * In the case of "English (Canada)" a lot is in English but most of the menus are not. * In the case of "English (U.K.)" most is in English, but not all. Workarounds: Set the interface language explicitly to be the desired language (instead of using the system language option). Observations: The issue can be reproduced on Ubuntu 16.04's GIMP 2.8.16 when there is a list of languages as described above selected in the Language Support section of the System Settings. From the command line this can be achieved by exporting the environment value LANGUAGE with a colon-separated list of languages (e.g. "en:fr", "en_US:fr", "en_CA:fr", "en_GB:fr", etc.).
Is this the same as bug 770708?
I reported this bug based on my experience with two platforms: 1. macOS Sierra 10.12.4 using GIMP 2.8.18. Thanks to the resolution of bug 770708 GIMP 2.8.20 does not show the reported behaviour. 2. Ubuntu 16.04 using GIMP 2.8.18. I believe that the above bug resolution patches a section of the gettext code specific to OS X. Therefore the solution would not seem to apply to Ubuntu similar platforms (pending the upstream merge I have not built a custom binary to test this; I have observed that GIMP 2.8.20 on Debian Linux unstable also exhibits this behaviour, but this adds little). Despite my initial reaction about this problem being GIMP-specific, after reading the comments on the other bug and further testing on Ubuntu/Debian I have realized that many other locale-aware programs suffer the same issue. I guess that whether to consider this a GIMP problem or not would depend on the gettext-approved way of handling English localizations. To further illustrate the issue, if on Ubuntu or Debian one's environment has LANGUAGE=en:en_US:en_CA:en_GB:fr:es GIMP's UI seems to roughly of no "English", no "US English", half "Canadian English", three-sevenths of "British English", a teaspoon of "French", perhaps a pinch of Spanish, and the rest of default English source text. Other programs seem to have no localized English variants so they fallback directly to French, then Spanish, and finally (English) source strings. Fully populating the incomplete English localizations and adding the non-existent ones would seem to be a fix, but perhaps it is not desirable or feasible. An alternative would seem to be to add another gettext patch, though I imagine that this is not the place to evaluate whether or not the upstream behaviour should be different (e.g. by always assuming that the source strings will be in English so that it is safe to ignore the rest of the list of languages once an English variant is detected, which seems to be what is done specifically for OS X).
I don't think the fix in bug 770708 is specific to the OSX platform, but it might only be in use there - it needs to be fixed in and by gettext. OSX was just the first platform where it was discovered.
-- GitLab Migration Automatic Message -- This bug has been migrated to GNOME's GitLab instance and has been closed from further activity. You can subscribe and participate further through the new bug through this link to our GitLab instance: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/issues/1079.