Created attachment 54258 [details] Screenshot showing the results of changing the System Settings language from English to Russian Version: unspecified (using KDE 4.5.4) OS: Linux All KDE applications have a Help->Swith Application Language command which can be used to switch that application's user interface to a different language; the change is to take effect after the program is restarted. However, when the program is restarted, only some text labels in the user interface appear in the new language; the rest appear in the default language. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Launch any application. I've been able to reproduce the problem with Kopete and System Settings. 2. Help->Switch Application Language 3. Select a language other than KDE's default language from the Primary language drop-down list. For example, my default language is American English, so I select Russian from the list. 4. OK 5. A message appears indicating that the change will take effect after the application is restarted. Click OK. 6. Close the application. 7. Restart the application. Actual Results: 8. Some text labels in the application's user interface are in Russian, but some remain in English. (It may be necessary to open some dialogs to find them.) See the attached screenshot. Expected Results: 8. All text labels in the user interface should be in Russian. I have also been able to reproduce the problem going the other direction -- that is, for a user where the default KDE language is Russian, all the text labels in System Settings and Kopete are initially in Russian. If I then try to switch the application language to American English and restart, then some of the labels change to English, but the rest stay in Russian.
I just tried "KDE_LANG=de systemsettings" on a system which has US English as default locale (today's trunk). The application toolbar appears in German, but all module icons still have English labels. As for Kopete, it is a bit suspicious that its menu item is just called "Configure..." instead of "Configure Kopete...". It might have some messed KGlobal configuration, so I suggest to report a separate bug for Kopete.
This is a bug in KService, which blindly reads from the Sycoca.
*** Bug 264289 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
The "Configure..." label in Kopete's Settings menu has already been reported as Bug 125199.
*** Bug 280518 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 161488 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Bug 161488 comment #4 suggests this is a WONTFIX.
If the "switch application language" command cannot be made to change all user interface labels, then the command should be removed, or at least the user should be warned that some labels will remain in the system default language. Personally I would favour the latter, since even having some of the labels in the correct language is often good enough. By the way, I can reproduce this problem with KTorrent as well. After switching the language, most labels are in the new language, except for those in the Plugins list.
Bug is still valid on platform 4.13.2. For those who work on fixing bugs and have sometimes difficulties understanding what bug reporters are referring to: The switch working correctly would help to find the correct English wordings for bug reports. (System default language here is German. After setting the switch to English for System Settings the module names are still in German. Switching the Help Center to English makes it show only the contents in the "Contents" tab on the left in English while the actual help text on the right stays German. I guess this is due to missing English help files but an ideal world the language switcher would be smart enough to do what humans expect from it and offer to load the missing help files.)
Fixed for applications using KDE Frameworks >= 5.15