Subject:Chinese translation incomplete in Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon - Missing language-pack-gnome packages

[mayloglog]

1. System Information:

• Release: Linux Mint 22.3
• Desktop Environment: Cinnamon
• Locale: zh_CN.UTF-8

2. Describe the Issue:
When installing Chinese (Simplified) language support via the "Language Settings" GUI, the system is only partially localized. Many core system applications remain in English.

Specifically, I noticed that the following applications were still showing English interfaces:

• Disks (gnome-disk-utility)
• Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab)
• Nemo (File Manager)
• And various other system utilities.

As a new user, I investigated the package status and found that the GUI tool seems to have missed installing the GNOME-specific language packs, which are essential since these applications rely on the GNOME/GTK translation stack.

3. Steps to Reproduce:

1. Install Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon.
2. Go to Language Settings -> Install / Remove Languages.
3. Add Chinese, China (UTF-8) and click Install Language Packs.
4. Set Chinese as the main language and click Apply System-Wide.
5. Reboot or Log out/in.
6. Open "Disks" or "Nemo" and observe that the interface is still in English.

4. Expected Behavior:
The "Language Settings" tool should automatically install all relevant language packs (including language-pack-gnome-zh-hans) to ensure a consistent localized experience across the Cinnamon desktop.

5. Actual Behavior:
The GUI tool only installs the base language packs, leaving many GTK-based system tools unlocalized.

6. Workaround (How I resolved it):
I manually installed the missing packages and regenerated the locale via the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install language-pack-gnome-zh-hans language-pack-gnome-zh-hans-base
sudo locale-gen zh_CN.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LANG=zh_CN.UTF-8

After performing these steps, the aforementioned applications displayed correctly in Chinese.

7. Additional Note:
   Since I am a beginner, I am not entirely sure if this is a dependency logic error in mintlocale or a specific issue with the 22.3 package list, but I hope this information helps in improving the user experience for non-English speakers.

[Bob-A-Dook]

I've looked into this and can suggest a fix (not a maintainer, BTW, just a regular Mint user).

The reason Mintlocale misses some translations is that there seem to be two formats used for Chinese language packages in APT:

1. {package_name}-zh-{country_code} (the traditional format),
2. {package_name}-zh-{general_type}, where general_type is either hans (for simplified Chinese) or hant (for traditional Chinese).

Currently, all language packages are matched to template 1. This way, for the Chinese, China locale, only three packages make it through the filtering:

['libreoffice-l10n-zh-cn', 'libreoffice-help-zh-cn', 'thunderbird-locale-zh-cn']

They are the only ones installed if the Install language packages button is clicked.

Some observations

The file used by Mintlocale for listing all languages (in add.py) is /usr/share/i18n/SUPPORTED.
Inside, there are four unique locales containing the Chinese language code (zh):

• zh_CN (China)
• zh_SG (Singapore)
• zh_HK (Hong Kong)
• zh_TW (Taiwan)

In Mintlocale, they are then transformed to lowercase and joined with hyphens.
From what I've found on StackOverflow and on Haiku's forum, this is how the current codes should map to the general variations used by some packages:

zh-cn -> zh-hans
zh-sg -> zh-hans
zh-hk -> zh-hant
zh-tw -> zh-hant

(Not sure about it though. It would be best if a native speaker confirmed it).

Also, a simple replacement of country codes wouldn't work (e.g. all zh-cn to zh-hans), since the classical language-country template is also used for some packages, like the three mentioned near the beginning.

Potential fix

The cleanest solution I could think of was adding a fallback cache search using a different package name if: a) the first one fails, and b) the language code is zh.

To try it out, I've applied some small changes to install remove.py.
First, I've changed a single line (if pkgname in self.cache:) from the build_lang_list function to this:

pkg_in_cache = (pkgname in self.cache)
if language_code == 'zh' and not pkg_in_cache:
    try: pkg_in_cache, pkgname = self.fallback_cache_check( pkgname, language_code, country_code )
    except Exception: pass
if pkg_in_cache:

And added a new function to the MintLocale class:

def fallback_cache_check( self, pkgname, language_code, country_code ):
    '''Checks the cache for close variations of a package name'''
    if language_code == 'zh':
        name_end = pkgname[-3:]
        # Match country codes to either simplified or traditional Chinese
        if name_end in ('-hk','-tw'):
            pkgname = pkgname[:-3] + '-hant'
        elif name_end in ('-cn','-sg'):
            pkgname = pkgname[:-3] + '-hans'

    return (pkgname in self.cache), pkgname

The fallback check doesn't affect the selected locale, flag etc. Only the number of language packages found for some Chinese locales.

Result

After the change, there will be 6 packages passing the filters and marked for installation for the Chinese, China locale. This includes the two packages @mayloglog had to install manually, and the three which are currently installed:

['language-pack-zh-hans', 'language-pack-gnome-zh-hans', 'libreoffice-l10n-zh-cn', 'libreoffice-help-zh-cn', 'firefox-locale-zh-hans', 'thunderbird-locale-zh-cn']

And for Chinese, Singapore (which showed 0 packages to install before the change):

['language-pack-zh-hant', 'language-pack-gnome-zh-hant', 'firefox-locale-zh-hant', 'thunderbird-locale-zh-hant']

Let me know if you have any comments :) If everything's OK, I can create a pull request.

Potential improvements

If we look at the packages for Singapore listed above, we can see that two packages with LibreOffice translations are missing compared to the Chinese version.

The results of apt-cache search show that LibreOffice only offers zh-cn and zh-tw packages. These locale codes might have been used as general synonyms for traditional and simplified Chinese; the discussions linked above suggest it's a common practice.

However, I wasn't sure, so I left this issue untouched just to stay on the safe side. If there's a need, it would be easy to make the fallback function do another check, after replacing zh-sg -> zh-cn and zh-hk -> zh-tw, and thus find the LibreOffice packages.