Setting locale

When setting the locale via LC_MESSAGES or LC_ALL etc., this affects
both make's own messages such as "Entering directory" and those from
commands run by it (here: "total" from ls), e.g.:

% cat Makefile
test:
	@ls -l
% make -C.
make: Entering directory '/tmp'
total 4
-rw------- 1 frank frank 14 Jul 10 08:48 Makefile
make: Leaving directory '/tmp'
% LC_MESSAGES=de_DE make -C.
make: Verzeichnis ,,/tmp" wird betreten
insgesamt 4
-rw------- 1 frank frank 14 Jul 10 08:48 Makefile
make: Verzeichnis ,,/tmp" wird verlassen

Is there a way to change only one of them? (Background: I want
make's messages always in English so I can parse them in a wrapper
script, in particular the directory messages so the scripts knows
which directories to prepend to filenames in messages. But I don't
want to affect the output of commands run.)

When I asked AI, it hallucinated an option "make --locale=C".
Unless there is already a way to do this, this would seem a useful
option to implement. I think you'd only need to pass its value as
the second argument to setlocale().

Regards,
Frank