My system is set up for language fallback, as per: https://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_node/The-LANGUAGE-variable.html The "purpose" of this setting is that if a language catalog is not available, rather than falling back to "C", you can fall back to something else. This is an affect of me installing German and Japanese keyboards, for language classes.
$ locale
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US:de:ja
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE=C
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
When I run "vmware-view" all the screen interfaces (menus, buttons, etc.) are in German. Strangely, Workstation does NOT exhibit this effect.
If I run "LANGAUGE="" /usr/bin/vmware-view" (or put LANGUAGE="" in the /usr/bin/vmware-view file at the top), then it's in English. If you strace the launch, you'll see that the binary looks for en_US catalogs, doesn't find them, so falls back to German.
Again: Workstation doesn't do this, so the catalogs are built right there:
