How to start a single application using another translation language? LC_ALL?

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1

I have a friend who uses Gnome translated to Swedish, while I use the English (US) translation. Sometimes I need to guide him through application menus, and to do that easily I need to check the swedish names of menu items and labels. To do that I want to start a single application with the Swedish locale. Is that possible, and if so, how do I do that?

I have tried to start the application from the terminal with LC_ALL set. That works for example with firefox but it fails for gnome apps, like gnome-control-center:

LC_ALL=sv_SE.utf-8 firefox # Works fine, ui strings with swedish locale.
LC_ALL=sv_SE.utf-8 gnome-control-center # Fails, ui string still in en_US locale.

Of course I can change settings for my entire Gnome session to Swedish and restart, but that’s a bit cumbersome when all I want is just to check the translation for this one specific application.

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Both LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 and LC_ALL=de_DE.UTF-8 should work.

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Thanks @matthiasc, your response spurred me to dig deeper. Changing only LC_ALL or only LANG, or both made no difference. Finally I noticed in the output of the command locale that the variable LANGUAGE was set to en_US.

$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:en
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
...
LC_ALL=

It appears that LANGUAGE takes precedence over LANG and LC_ALL. If I unset LANGUAGE, then changing the value of LANG or LC_ALL works as expected. Of course simply changing LANGUAGE works too.

LANGUAGE=sv_SE.utf-8 gnome-control-center

Hurrah!

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