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Wikipedia entry for GNU gettext shows an example where the locale is just the lanuage, "fr". Whereas the 'i18n gettext() “hello world” example' in SO has the locale value with both the language and country, "es_MX".

I have modified the "es_MX" example to use just the lanuage, "es". This covers making an "es" rather than "'es_MX'" message catalog and invoking the program with environment variable LANG set to "es".But this produces the English text rather the expected Spanish. 

cat >hellogt.cxx <<EOF // hellogt.cxx #include <libintl.h> #include <locale.h> #include <iostream> int main (){ setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); bindtextdomain("hellogt", "."); textdomain( "hellogt"); std::cout << gettext("hello, world!") << std::endl; } EOF g++ -ohellogt hellogt.cxx xgettext -d hellogt -o hellogt.pot hellogt.cxx msginit --no-translator -l es -o hellogt_spanish.po -i hellogt.pot sed --in-place hellogt_spanish.po --expression='/#: /,$ s/""/"hola mundo"/' sed --in-place hellogt_spanish.po --expression='s/PACKAGE VERSION/hellogt 1.0/' mkdir -p ./es.utf8/LC_MESSAGES msgfmt -c -v -o ./es.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/hellogt.mo hellogt_spanish.po LANG=es.utf8 ./hellogt

According to Controlling your locale with environment variables:

environment variable, LANGUAGE, which is used only by GNU gettext ... If defined, LANGUAGE takes precedence over LC_ALL, LC_MESSAGES, and LANG.

LANGUAGE=es.utf8 ./hellogt

produces the expected Spanish text rather than English.

But this does not explain why "LANG=es" does not work.

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    In which distro are you working on? Commented Jul 3, 2009 at 20:29
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    It's worth noting that there's no standard for locale names. Most unices define locale names of the form xx_YY where xx is a language subtag and YY is a region subtag, sometimes followed by a character set indication. Commented Feb 16, 2011 at 20:52

5 Answers 5

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The locale you use must be generated in the system. Use locale -a to see all generated locales. Locale source files must be present under /usr/share/i18n/locales/, and as far as I can see, all are of type 'language_COUNTRY'. If you really must use 'es' locale, you can prepare necessary files, you can modify /etc/locale.gen to include 'es' and run locale-gen to generate it. Otherwise, use an 'es' locale with a country.

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Wikipedia is probably not the best reference for stuff like this. It usually has very simple examples that may not be widely applicable, constructed for understanding concepts more than for practical considerations.

Why not use gnu's own documentation?

http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/gettext.html#Setting-the-POSIX-Locale

You can set LANGUAGE to "es" (or even "es:fr:en" for a priority list), but LANG would still need to be set to es_MX or something like that. The docs explain it fairly clearly.

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From Zac Thompson's link to GNU gettext utilities section 2.3 Setting the Locale through Environment Variables the sub-section The LANGUAGE variable:

In the LANGUAGE environment variable, but not in the other environment variables, ‘ll_CC’ combinations can be abbreviated as ‘ll’ to denote the language's main dialect. For example, ‘de’ is equivalent to ‘de_DE’ (German as spoken in Germany), and ‘pt’ to ‘pt_PT’ (Portuguese as spoken in Portugal) in this context.

Makes the point that "es" is an abbreviation that only LANGUAGE but not LANG supports.

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Might this be because Spanish is spoken in many different countries and may have variations and quirks between dialects? Same as en_US, en_CA, or en_GB etc.

In fact, here are your options - I think you can guess most of the countries (AR=Argentina, BO=Bolivia, CL=Chile etc)

es_AR es_AR.iso88591 es_AR.utf8 es_BO es_BO.iso88591 es_BO.utf8 es_CL es_CL.iso88591 es_CL.utf8 es_CO es_CO.iso88591 es_CO.utf8 es_CR es_CR.iso88591 es_CR.utf8 es_DO es_DO.iso88591 es_DO.utf8 es_EC es_EC.iso88591 es_EC.utf8 es_ES es_ES@euro es_ES.iso88591 es_ES.iso885915@euro es_ES.utf8 es_ES.utf8@euro es_GT es_GT.iso88591 es_GT.utf8 es_HN es_HN.iso88591 es_HN.utf8 es_MX es_MX.iso88591 es_MX.utf8 es_NI es_NI.iso88591 es_NI.utf8 es_PA es_PA.iso88591 es_PA.utf8 es_PE es_PE.iso88591 es_PE.utf8 es_PR es_PR.iso88591 es_PR.utf8 es_PY es_PY.iso88591 es_PY.utf8 es_SV es_SV.iso88591 es_SV.utf8 es_US es_US.iso88591 es_US.utf8 es_UY es_UY.iso88591 es_UY.utf8 es_VE es_VE.iso88591 es_VE.utf8
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I'm not really sure about this, but I've been working with Joomla and others CMS and the code for Spanish - Spain is: es_ES

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