Hi there,

I am running 11.10 and I need to use Chinese, to simplify things I install it with Chinese option, other than add it afterward, and it boots up to full Chinese no problem. I only want to read and input Chinese, but don't want the Chinese UI, coz the translation is not precise and incomplete make things harder to understand. I tried the system setting to change the system language to English, but nothing happened it's still Chinese here and there, after messing around with the setting I suddenly got a pop up said the language support is not installed, so I install it, but still Chinese UI. Then I removed the Chinese support and reboot, messing with the setting a bit and finally I got a message, asked if I want to change the folder names to English, I say yes and most of the things now English, but the software center still half Chinese half English, how do I change that ?

Wrong post deleted

Start by setting up your system and your desktop entirely in English, with a UTF-8 locale. UTF-8 will give it support for the entire range of unicode characters. Most distros default to it these days.

Then install an IME framework such as scim, uim, or ibus, and a corresponding Chinese backend. This will allow you to input Chinese text. Install a decent set of Chinese fonts as well. This should be pretty much all you need to do, barring the occasional oddball program.

You can go back afterwards and tweak independent locale settings, if you need certain things like numbers and dates treated in the Chinese way. You might occasionally also need to install Chinese internationalization packages for certain programs or subsystems, which provide internal support for other languages. This is becoming rarer over time as the majority of programs now have native unicode support. You should not need to install any localization (l10n) packages, as those only hold the interface data for that language (menu entries and so on).

Note that if you have any text files in a non-UTF-8 encoding, or interact with external devices that use a non-unicode locale (mounting a drive/share with filenames in a different encoding, for example), you may have to make sure they are converted/translated properly first.