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SettingLANG

How To tell LyX to speak in a different language

There are many reasons why you might want LyX to speak to you in a language different from the system default:

1. Modern distros (Fedora, SuSE 9.2, ...) default to a UTF8 encoding in their LANG setting. LyX has still difficulties with unicode, the menu entries for Navigation and the search dialog do not work properly in lyx-qt (Bug 1755). Note that this has been fixed in LyX 1.4.0. It is still not fully Unicode aware, but manual setting of the LANG variable is no longer needed.
2. The tip in the lyx-users list mentions a menu entry Insert>Label but your lyx speaks German and you do not find the corresponding expression.
3. Curiosity -- just testing what languages the lyx user interface can speak.

Set LANG

Georg Baum proposed the following workaround in the lyx-users list and on [1]

You can even automate this by defining an alias (e.g. in ~/.bashrc, if you use the bourne again shell):

 alias lyx='LANG=de_DE lyx'

I have also

 alias lyx-en='LANG=en_GB; lyx'

to easily start up an English-spoken LyX.

Define \default_language in LyX preferences

Sometimes, setting the correct LANG enviroment variable is not enough to completely "translate" LyX, at least on Windows. You have also set 'Default language' in 'Preferences --> Language Settings'. Not doing so makes LyX 1.3.7 to use incorrect charset in "grey boxes" such as foot, Ref, etc.

For example, setting LANG=ru_RU do make LyX speak russian, but cyrillic text inside "grey boxes" is shown in latin-1 encoding (instead of KOI-8r or Win1251), which is unreadable. Setting the default language to 'russian' fixes the problem...