Re: translated manuals output file and directory name/location

> From: Gavin Smith <[email protected]>
> Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2026 10:42:34 +0100
> Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
> 
> On Fri, Aug 07, 2026 at 08:37:26AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 
> > 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.
> 
> So maybe a better question than asking where translated manuals should
> be installed is what an ideal user experience of accessing translated manuals
> would be?
> 
> With the "man" command, "man -L de cups" works better than "LANG=de man cups"
> to access the "cups(1)" page in German.  This is with man-db.  (A side
> point, but Info can display man pages as well, but doesn't handle getting
> translated man pages.)
> 
> So one possibility is to have a command line option to Info that tries
> to get a translated manual.

Yes, SGTM.

> We could also have a command inside Info
> that looks for translated versions of the manual currently being displayed,

Yes, that would be also useful.

I could also envision a variable that would determine the preferred
language: the Info reader will try to find a manual translated to that
language if it exists.