December 27th, 2016

Why don’t I get properly translated program output after installing the corresponding language pack?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

A customer reported that they installed the Portuguese (Portugal) language pack, but even after rebooting, the ipconfig command still printed results in English. Same problem occurs with Turkish. But German is fine. What’s going on?

There are multiple levels of localization. This page has some nice diagrams which illustrate them.

I’ve reproduced the diagrams below (in case the original link stops working).

Fully Localized Language Pack
German 100%
Language-Neutral OS
Partially Localized Language Pack
Base language
Arabic 80% French 20%
Language-Neutral OS
Language Interface Pack (LIP)
Bosnian (Latin) 20%
Base language
Serbian-Latin 80% English 20% Partially Localized
Language Pack
Language-Neutral OS
Language Interface Pack (LIP)
Catalan 20%
Parent language
French 100%
Language-Neutral OS

What’s going on is that Portuguese (Portugal) and Turkish are in the second case: A partially-localized language pack. In particular, console applications and PowerShell Console UI are not localized and fall back to English.

This also explains why German doesn’t have the same problem: German is a fully-localized language, including console applications and PowerShell Console UI.

Category
Old New Thing
Topics
Tips/Support

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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