Change language - in bash only

Support
1

I don’t really think this is a KDE Plasma specific question, but it might be??

I know from experience that changing the language of the OS is more complicated in Plasma than any other DE I have ever used. But I’ve done it lots of times now and always manage it.

But recently I’ve come across a new problem.

I have my system completely set to Spanish. I installed Manjaro KDE Plasma with my native language, which is English, but I’ve changed everything to Spanish, except for a few programs, like Libreoffice.

But I’d like the terminal to be in English. I use bash.

I have read tons of posts online and tried lots of things, but I cannot get anything to work.

I have this in the bottom of my .bashrc file.

export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8

I also tried putting into .bash_profile, but that does not work either.

I don’t want to change anything else - just bash.

Can it be done?

–

These are my generated locales.

en_GB.UTF-8 UTF-8
es_ES.UTF-8 UTF-8

Contents of /home/user/.config/plasma-localerc

[Formats]
LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
useDetailed=true

[Translations]

Contents of /etc/locale.conf

LANG=es_ES.UTF-8
#Commented out by me.
#LANGUAGE=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NAME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_PAPER=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=en_GB.UTF-8
#LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8

I got these settings from a very helpful post on this forum. It changes everything, which is what I wanted. But I thought, via .bashcr, I could get bash to act independently, but so far I have failed completely.

2

This made me curious because I have a tutorial post about this.

It seems you have to set it inside the terminal program, because the terminal does not follow /etc/locale.conf in kde it seems.

I changed my language to Swedish in /etc/locale.conf but it did not matter, changed to other tty, did not matter (witch is strange actually). Rebooted, switched tty and it was now in Swedish.
BUT the consoles inside of KDE (and the desktop for that matter) is all still in English.

So change the language in the terminal for it to work inside KDE.

3 
unset LANG
unset LC_ALL

This will make the programs you use on the terminal use English which the default.

4

Ah, it’s your post. I that case I would like to say thank you very much for writing that post.

It’s so useful that I have it converted to pdf and saved to my computer in case it ever disappears from this forum. I had used other tutorials to change the language of Plasma, but they were not reliable and sometimes I’d end up with a mixture of Englisn and Spanish.

Yours works 100%. Even the login screen is in Spanish. It’s superb. :+1: :+1: :+1:

1 Like
5

Thanks. I can’t do this just now as I am rushing to get off to work, but I’ll do it later.

Should I remove my “export LANG=en_GB.UTF-8” line?

And I gather this won’t affect the rest of the system - just bash?

6

It affects everything what is run with with bash or sh anywhere as user.

Yes.

7

I did not think about unsetting insted. That is a very valid point.

8

Many many thanks. It works. :+1: :+1:

I’ve searched online for how to do this a hundred times, and tried loads of things from various forum posts. None of them worked. Your solution has worked great.

You (@megavolt ) and @bedna , between you, are responsible for my Plasma language config’ being the way I want it. Thanks to you both.

KDE Plasma is by far my favourte desktop environment, but it’s also the hardest to switch languages with. When I tried Mint, Gnome, and XFCE, I was amazed at how simple it was to change the language, as I’m used to fighting with Plasma.

9

I meant to ask. I gather the unset command just nullifies the LANG AND LC_ALL settings that I created in those two files. That’s how it looks anyway.