Re: Language switcher applet

[Germán Poó Caamaño <gpoo ubiobio cl>]

Le jeudi 21 juillet 2005 à 22:23 +0700, Ross Golder a écrit :
> I now use GNOME from day-to-day in my secondary language (Thai). I've
> found it has helped me practice reading/typing Thaiscript (a non-Roman
> alphabet) and is improving my Thai vocabulary. However, from
> time-to-time I come across a translated error message (in Thai) that I
> don't understand (yet!). Wouldn't it be great if I could switch the
> displayed language of all the GNOME applications on the screen with a
> language switcher applet, as easily as you can switch the keyboard
> layout between US and Thai (and British when I need a pound sign!). Not
> only would it let me get on quicker, but it would also help me improve
> my language skills, as I could spend a moment each time I get stuck
> flicking between the two languages and learn the words and the meaning
> of the phrases without having to resort to the dictionary :)
> 
> I can think of tons of cases where this feature would be useful and it
> would be yet another cool feature that all the other desktops don't have
> (yet, afaik). So, I'm just wondering if it can be done and what would be
> involved.

I can comment another case.  In my desktop on my job I use French, as
the same plan as you (my native language is Spanish).  However, when I
run synaptic (the software to update/upgrade my Debian/Ubuntu machine),
but when I need to answer a dialog, I'd like to see the dialog in
English (because I could break my machine if I misundertood a dialog).

> Has this kind of thing been discussed before somewhere/sometime? If so,
> where? How feasible is it? What mechanisms would need to be put in place
> for it to work? Can a program be made to change its LANG, regather it's
> translations and relabel all it's widgets on the fly easily enough?
> Could it work in a similar way to how changing the GTK+ theme notifies
> all the running GNOME apps?

In previous versions of GNOME it was possible to run a application
(o create a launcher) as "LANG=es_US fo".  However it was disabled
around 2.2 o 2.0 (I guess to avoid any security issue as LD_PRELOAD
or so).

-- 
Germán Poó Caamaño
http://www.ubiobio.cl/~gpoo/