in kubuntu 20.04 GIMP offers only English language

[Raimondo Giammanco]

release: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
gimp version: 2.10.18-1 500

Make sure in Plasma Settings -> Regional settings -> Language your language is at the top of the list
Gimp should auto-detect and use the system language.
Conversely Gimp runs always in English and it's impossible to manually set another language:
if you click Edit -> Preferences -> Interface the Language section offers only English (en_US) aside from System Language.

In a terminal, typing
LANG=it gimp
(replacing it by ru, ja, ...) don't switch gimp to the wanted language

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1875829/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Raimondo Giammanco (rai)]

I apologize, before I left the Package field blank because I'm not sure it's gimp or some plasma library

[Raimondo Giammanco (rai)]

sudo apt install language-pack-gnome-xx

this allows GIMP to correctly display the menu in the desired xx language

so the bug would seem to be the lack of that package among the GIMP dependencies
unless you want to pre-install it in kubuntu for all gtk apps

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Andreas Fester (andreas-fester)]

Installing the gnome language pack does not work for me:

$ dpkg -l "language-pack-de*"
Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold
| Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend
|/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad)
||/ Name Version Architecture Description
+++-=====================-================-============-=======================================
ii language-pack-de 1:21.04+20210415 all translation updates for language German
ii language-pack-de-base 1:21.04+20210415 all translations for language German

Still Gimp only shows "System Language" and "English [en_US]" as choices in the language selection dropdown at the "Preferences/User Interace" dialog.

(This is on Ubuntu 21.04 btw)

[Andreas Fester (andreas-fester)]

This seems to be a packaging issue. "language-pack-de-base" installs the "gimp*.mo" files at "/usr/share/locale-langpack/de/LC_MESSAGES", while gimp searches them at "/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES". After manually copying "/usr/share/locale-langpack/de/LC_MESSAGES/gimp*" to "/usr/share/locale/de/LC_MESSAGES/", the entry for the new language is shown in the "Language" dropdown.

Probably "gimp_locale_directory()" returns the wrong directory (called in gimp_language_store_parser_init() at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/blob/0c8a7891f75a9f41cd36fc0efe2ad506a53d0a15/app/widgets/gimplanguagestore-parser.c).

The "gimp_locale_directory()" function either uses the value from the "GIMP2_LOCALEDIR" environment variable, OR a compile time absolute directory ("LOCALEDIR") OR the directory "share/locale" below the GIMP installation directory, in that order (see "gimp_locale_directory()" at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gimp/-/blob/0c8a7891f75a9f41cd36fc0efe2ad506a53d0a15/libgimpbase/gimpenv.c).

A workaround is to set the GIMP2_LOCALEDIR to "/usr/share/locale-langpack" before launching gimp.

The solution is probably to set the LOCALEDIR compile time variable to "/usr/share/locale-langpack" when building gimp.

[Raimondo Giammanco (rai)]

The bug is still there in kubuntu 22.04
The workaround that works for me is still the one in comment #3.
@Andreas the package you should try installing is language-pack-gnome-de; the one you show you have installed in #5 is a different package

[chqdizzon (chqdizzon)]

I would recommend to automatically install the additional language-packs for localization, too.

I have installed kubuntu the first time after some years again and was really wondering, why still it is not "normal", that all localizations are applied automatically, independend from plasma/kde.