Comment 3 for bug 1594959

(I have opened a bug which has been marked as duplicate of this one. Not sure I need to add info there but just in case...)

In my case, the problem appeared in Mate 1.12, either with Ubuntu Mate 15.10 upgraded through the PPA, or with Ubuntu Mate 16.04.

My assumption is that Mate Control Center fetches its translations from the desktop files, looking for Name[xx] (where xx is "fr" for french, "de" for german and so on), as it appears that the launchers that are not translated only have a generic english Name in their desktop, while the ones that are translated have the Name[xx] lines. I assume that before Mate 1.12 they had the translated name. If that's the case, I'm not sure why they were dropped in the .desktop supplied with Mate 1.12 but they might have been replaced by the X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain option.

They are translated in the menu presumably because they get their translation through the X-Ubuntu-Gettext-Domain line in their .desktop file.

The best way to fix this would probably to update Mate Control Center so that it checks for the Gettext domain if it can't find a localized Name entry.