Someone in one of my other forums lives in the UK and noticed that “Favorites” is the spelling in his Application Launcher instead of the “Favourites” he expecting since his Locale was set to British English.
It hit me that I’d always thought that the locale would only effect things like time formats, money units and things like that. Does the locale setting even extend to spelling changes due to country preferences like “grey” vs “gray” and “colour” vs “color”. I was thinking such strings would be statically embedded in the code and not practical to flip on the fly with the locale?
I live in Thailand, I have ‘Favourites’, my localerc:.
[Formats]
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=C
LC_MONETARY=th_TH.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=th_TH.UTF-8
I still get names like ‘kcolorchooser’ nicknamed ‘Colour Chooser’ described as ‘Colour selector and palette editor’.
Not every locale has corresponding translations. But there are translations from American English to British English, just like there are from American English to French, Japanese etc etc.
(Edit - here’s a specific translation file with lots of examples of “color” → “colour”.)
The app can use the locale to switch its text into the locales language.
But that requires two things 1. The app to support translations and 2. There is a translation for your language.
When the translation does exist it may not have complete coverage of all messages or the translation may have errors.
I have a correction, the OP in the other forum was actually seeing this issue in the “Application Dashboard” and NOT the Application Launcher. I’d never heard of the thing before, so when he wrote Application Dashboard I thought he was talking about the Launcher. You can see it (Application Dashboard) by installing “kdeplasma-addons” if you don’t have that, and select “Show Alternatives..” in the Application Launcher menu, and then set it to Application Dashboard. Then, even if the Locale is set to British English, the Application Dashboard shows the “Favorites” spelling where it should be “Favourites”. I’ve confirmed this on my system.
They can raise a bug report for this. It looks like all this stuff (Application Dashboard is part of the kicker Plasma applet) is intended to have en_GB translations, so probably this string just got missed when creating the translations.