Turkish menu bar, I need English

[Jesse Ahmann]

I installed inkscape, was working fine. Then one day opened it up to find the whole program is in turkish. At least I thinks it's turkish?
I tried reinstalling, same thing. What is going on??? I use a Mac.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Did you by chance change the Mac OS X system preferences 'Order for sorted lists' from 'Standard' to 'Turkish' (or whatever the language is that Inkscape uses now) when that happened?
You can find it in 'System Preferences > International > Language: Order for sorted lists'.

Similar earlier reports:
Bug #488120 “UI language changing gradually to Greek”
Bug #349825 “Download Current Mac Version is French Only!”

[Jesse Ahmann (jesseahmann)]

after much random clicking I found "inkscape preferences" in turkish, clicked on a random word that meant "interface" changed language from System default to English. Funny thing is, English is the only language on my international language menu option through "System Preferences"
Strange problem

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Please look closer at the 'Language' pane of the OS X system preferences: There is a setting for 'sorting lists' somewhere - on OS X 10.5.8 it is in the lower right part of that pane. What does that setting say?

[Jesse Ahmann (jesseahmann)]

I had only one language listed: English. The sorting list was on English.
It's a strange problem. Glad it's fixed.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Could you test the following two queries? Open a Terminal window and enter these two commands:

defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale

defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleCollationOrder

and paste the output here?

[Jesse Ahmann (jesseahmann)]

Last login: Thu Aug 12 20:34:59 on console
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$ defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleLocale
2010-08-12 22:20:59.412 defaults[244:903]
The domain/default pair of (.GlobalPreferences, AppleLocale) does not exist
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$ defaults read .GlobalPreferences AppleCollationOrder
en
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$

[su_v (suv-lp)]

And these two?

grep "en" /usr/share/locale/locale.alias

grep "en" /usr/share/locale/locale.alias | tail -n1

[su_v (suv-lp)]

sorry, typo:

grep "en_" /usr/share/locale/locale.alias

[Jesse Ahmann (jesseahmann)]

Last login: Fri Aug 13 09:32:26 on ttys000
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$ grep "en_" /usr/share/locale/locale.alias
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$ grep "en" /usr/share/locale/locale.alias | tail -n1
slovenian sl_SI.ISO-8859-2
host-174-45-86-243:~ stickem$

[su_v (suv-lp)]

With your current settings (AppleLocale unset, AppleCollationOrder "en") I see no plausible way that the UI language of Inkscape would change to Turkish or another language unless it was changed within Inkscape's Preferences dialog.

AppleLocale unset, AppleCollationOrder "en" results in LANGSTR="" and LANG=".UTF-8" (set and used in Inkscape's launcher script), and when starting up Inkscape produces these console messages:

Setting Language: .UTF-8
(process:46234): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
 Using the fallback 'C' locale.

Inkscape then will use the default UI language (C -> English) if the setting in 'Inkscape Preferences > Interface > Language' is still 'System default' (initial value). Else the chosen language in Inkscape's preferences overrides any value set with $LANG.

Note that one can unintentionally change the Interface Language by using the scroll wheel while the 'Interface' preferences tab is open and the mouse is hovering over the popup list for the available languages, e.g. when searching for a specific preference.

[Jesse Ahmann (jesseahmann)]

Thank you for the excellent support.

[Mark (mark-cannon)]

I have just had the same problem (menus and toolbars mysteriously switched to Turkish). Reinstalling inkscape did not solve the problem. Once I had found the language option on the menu, I was able to switch back to English menus and toolbars by setting language to "English" rather than "System Default". The problem occurred while the language preference was set to "System Default", but, after fixing the problem and then setting the language preference back to "System Default", the menus remain in English. I am using Mac OS X (10.5.8), and the only language available in system preferences > international > languages is English.

[Tibor Arpas (tibor-arpas)]

The same here, on my MAC OS X.

[su_v (suv-lp)]

Changing bug status to 'Confirmed' based on new duplicate bug #694315.

[sampablokuper (sampablokuper)]

Happened to me too, on OS X 10.6.5

[D (dschnitze1)]

I had the same problem. For people that are facing this problem at some point in the future: typing <shift>-<ctrl>-p gets you straight to the preferences pane. In the new window (which you might have to expand a bit) the 'language' button is the one at the top in the right side of the window.

[ssducf (ssd-ubu)]

If it helps, after inkscape opened with goofy language settings, I opened it manually from a terminal
using "open /Applications/Inkscape.app" and it came up in english.
My terminal already had LANG=en_US.UTF-8

From there, it was trivial to force the setting to english instead of system defaults.

[Razvan Surdulescu (surdules)]

I am running into this same problem as well. I just installed Inkscape 0.48 on Snow Leopard 10.6.8, running XQuartz 2.7.1_rc2 (xorg-server 1.11.4). I have never run Inkscape on this computer before. The first time Inkscape came up, it came up in Turkish. I checked the System Preferences > Language & Text settings, and the default language is English everywhere. I also launched Inkscape from the X11 Xterm, and it displayed "default language: TR" on the terminal before opening up.

I was able to change the language to English via ctrl+shift+p, but it required some hunting around. Please look into a fix for this bug!

[Jenna Nelson (jem)]

I had the same problem. For anyone else stuck:

<ctrl>-<shift>-p brings up the preferences dialog (or forth from the bottom in the left most menu, which is File<->Dosya > Inskscape Preferences<->Inskcape Secenekleri), then
Interface<->Interface then
Language (requires retart)

...then File > Quit<->Ciklis (bottom menu item), reopen and you are good to go.

[Joel Godin (joel-godin)]

Just had the same problem with 0.48.2 r9819
It just did it one time, shut it down,
went to system preferences>langquage> re-selected 'Order for sorted lists'
then opened Inkscape again, and was okay.

iMac 10.7.5 2012

[Beluga (buovjaga)]

Has anyone seen this weirdness occurring lately?

[Qantas94Heavy (qantas94heavy)]

Cannot reproduce this with Inkscape 1.0. If this is still an issue, please check the listed bugs here: https://inkscape.org/report

Closed by: https://gitlab.com/Qantas94Heavy