[R] Help, my RGui is speaking French!

[Prof Brian Ripley]

On Fri, 5 Aug 2005, Peter Dalgaard wrote:

> "Grathwohl, Dominik, LAUSANNE,  NRC-BAS" <dominik.grathwohl at rdls.nestle.com> writes:
>
>> Dear R-helpers,
>>
>> First of all I have nothing against the French language!
>> But now my problem, yesterday I installed R 2.1.1
>> and I had to experience that my RGui is speaking French.
>> My windows locals is French (Switzerland).
>> I'm used to English and I want to reset my RGui to English.
>> I was seeking for the solution in the archives,
>> however not successfully.

Well, did you try the `R Installation and Administration Manual'?  That 
does sound appropriate and it is covered there.

>> By the way the searchable archives via:
>> http://www.r-project.org/, Mailing Lists, R-help, web-interface, searchable achieves,
>> did not work: http://maths.newcastle.edu.au/~rking/R/
>> Also I was seeking in the FAQ's
>> http://cran.r-project.org/doc/FAQ/R-FAQ.html
>> and
>> http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/pub/R/rw-FAQ.html
>> and could not find the solution.
>> I'm sure that lots of people have queried already
>> and that the solution is already written down somewhere.
>> However I cant find it.
>> Could somebody give me a hint?
>
> Make sure that the environment variable LANGUAGE is set to "en". I
> think the consensus is that putting it into HOME/.Renviron is the most
> practical way.

The rw-FAQ recommends a different way, though.

This is a new topic in the next release of the rw-FAQ (to go with the next 
release of R) since it has recently been fairly frequently asked.  To wit

   I selected English for Installation but R runs in Chinese!

   Precisely, you selected English @strong{for installation}!  The language
   of the installer has nothing to do with the language used to run R: this
   is completely standard Windows practice (and necessary as different
   users of the computer may use different languages).

   The language R uses for menus and messages is determined by the
   @emph{locale}: please read the appropriate manual (the @emph{R
   Installation and Administration Manual}) for the details.  You can
   ensure that R uses English messages by appending @code{LANGUAGE=en} to
   the shortcut you use to start R.


-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595