Re: translated manuals output file and directory name/location

> From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]>
> Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2026 21:35:19 +0100
> 
> I was looking at how manpages translations are handled.  On my system,
> there are language directories under "/usr/share/man".  (For example,
> "/usr/share/man/de/man1/cups.1.gz" is the "cups(1)" man page in German.)
> However, it doesn't appear to be possible to access them with the "man"
> command without having the locale installed for that language, e.g. if
> I run "LANG=de man cups" I get an error message:
> 
> man: can't set the locale; make sure $LC_* and $LANG are correct
> 
> - as I don't have a locale de_DE etc. installed.
> 
> Not sure if that is a model worth imitating or not.  It would be useful
> to find out what the experiences of readers of non-English manuals was.

At least for us the maintainers of GNU packages, the above model would
be a significant annoyance, because it makes it hard to read and
modify a manual for an arbitrary language.  Installing a locale,
especially if it is some special or exotic one, and turning it on is
not always possible, let alone easy.  What if I want to read the
manual translated into some language because someone reports a mistake
there, or just because I'm interested or maintain manuals in several
languages? why should I need to install and turn on a locale for these
cases?

More generally, IMO the time where internationalization was identical
to localization has long passed.  We live in a multilingual world,
where several different languages and scripts are routinely used on
the same computer at the same time, and frequently in the same
program.  Selection of a document written in a certain language should
no longer be tightly coupled to the locale, only the default might be
derived from it.  A locale defines many other settings that are truly
system-wide and should be obeyed, but the language of the documents
that I can easily choose should not depend on it.