On Nov 6, 2014, at 2:47 PM, Pascal Quantin <pascal.quantin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2014-11-06 21:58 GMT+01:00 Guy Harris <guy@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
>> 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.
>
> You seem to assume that all language translations are at the same quality as English. This is unfortunately not the case, especially for small projects not having a big community putting a lot of effort for maintaining an always evolving translation over the time. This is definitely a huge work and I admire people devoting time to this.
So this may be a function of large commercial projects, or large widely-used free software projects, with the resources to provide good translations for heavily-used languages and at least reasonably good translations for less-heavily-used languages (I'm assuming here, perhaps incorrectly, that the core applications for KDE and GNOME have good translations for a broad set of languages) vs. software from smaller commercial developers and smaller free-software communities that might not have the resources for that.
I.e., Microsoft Office for Windows might not have much use for a "select the language" option if Microsoft have the resources to do reasonably good translations for all languages Windows supports, and Konqueror or KWrite might not have much use for that if they have a contributor base that can provide translations for all languages KDE supports, but other apps might require an "override the system language setting" option to work around the lack of a good translation for the system language.
Wireshark probably doesn't have the user base that less specialized applications do, so it might fall into the latter category.