[Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:44 AM, Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 2014-11-06 20:33 GMT+01:00 Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 
>> On Nov 6, 2014, at 11:04 AM, Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>>> And as I said in an earlier email, letting a user manually select the language in an application is common practice on Windows.
>> 
>> So what are some examples of applications that support this?
> 
> To name a few of them: Notepad++, CCleaner, Defraggler, LibreOffice, VirtualBox, jv16 Power Tools, VLC, PDFCreator, SumatraPDF...
> To simplify things, applications seem to fall in 2 categories: either you download a specific package with just your language, or a global installer where user can override at any time the language.

Would another two categories be:

	applications from the free software community, which support manually setting the language;

	applications not from the free software community, which don't?

I.e., are there any applications not from the free software community that support this?

If not, why not?  Is it because the free software community are paying more attention to user needs, or is it because a lot of them come from the UNIX+{X11,Wayland,Mir} desktop world, in which not all desktops necessarily offer a system-wide GUI option to select the language (KDE does, GNOME presumably does, but other desktop environments, especially the "here's a window manager, that's enough" environments, might not).

I'm *really* trying to understand the reasons why an additional "select the language" option, over and above a system "select the language" option, is useful, and whether it's useful in *all* environments or only in ones where there isn't a system "select the language" option.

On Windows 7, the only "defaults to English" version that supports multiple languages appears to be Windows 7 Ultimate.  Do the non-English versions of, for example, Windows 7 Home Premium offer multiple languages?  Do the standard Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional versions sold in Canada offer both English and French?  Do versions sold in Europe - or, at least, in multilingual European countries such as Switzerland and Belgium - offer multiple languages?  Was that another reason to offer a separate "select the language" option in the application itself?  ("Was" because Windows 8 appears to support multilingual installations in all versions.)