Comment 17 for bug 605577

Here's what happens:

In an English system, the English language pack installs the following translation catalogs for yelp:

/usr/share/locale-langpack/en/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en@shaw/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_AU/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_CA/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo
/usr/share/locale-langpack/en_GB/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo

They correspond to each one of the variants for which there are translations. However, /usr/share/locale-langpack/en/LC_MESSAGES/yelp.mo should not exist, since that corresponds to the POSIX (C, or US English) locale, in which all applications are written - and therefore no translations are needed.

The 'en' translation is being created from the 'en@shaw' one, and that's because the translation tarball exported from Launchpad to create the latest full language pack on 2010-08-17 [1] contains the yelp en@shaw translation in the en/LC_MESSAGES folder. I'm not sure why, but perhaps because of the recent changes with @ locales in Launchpad?

I'm adding a task for Launchpad Translations.

Thanks Dennis for pointing to the cause of the problem.

[1] https://translations.launchpad.net/ubuntu/maverick/+language-packs