Command line tools in one language, system in another

Question

I am not native english speaker, so my Ubuntu language is different, and it's ok :) But I would like to have command line tools (SVN, for example) to print messages in english, and not in my system language.

Why, you ask? It's because lots of tutorials are in english, and it's IMHO more convenient to use command line that way. So, how to set command line programs to english, and system to another language?

Answer 1

If you run the env command, you will be given the environment variables for language.

LANGUAGE=
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8

If you set those variables to English settings, with the export command, any command called after this will be in "English mode".

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

You can also put this also in the .bashrc or .profile file in your home directory, this will be in effect every time you open a command line terminal.