Using GNOME's internationalization support

GNOME has had internationalization (sometimes called i18n support from the earliest phases of development. To get a GNOME program to give you messages in your favourite language, simply set your LANGUAGE environment variable to the two letter code for that language.

For example, the gnome-hello-2-i18n command invokes the gnome-hello variant which includes support for internationalization. If you want to see this program (or any GNOME application) display its menus and other information in Italian, you could type (for Bourne shell or bash):

$ LANGUAGE=it

$ export LANGUAGE

$ gnome-hello-2-i18n