How do I change the language of the man pages on Debian, while keeping the default language as english

Question

I've tried changing the man pages on debian from English to Italian but all I have tried hasn't worked yet.

First of all, I installed the manpages in Italian with apt install manpages-it.

I then edited the /etc/locale.gen file and uncommented it_IT.utf8, then ran locale-gen to update it. After that I tried with:

man -Lit printf
man --locale=it printf
LANG=it_IT.utf8

but none give me the manual pages in Italian.

The only manual page in Italian I can get is man man, but the other manuals are just in English.

Answer 1

The problem is that there's simply not many translated manual pages; when you look at the output of dpkg -L manpages-it, which lists all the files in the manpages-it package, you'll see it's only 107 pages – man is one of them, bash is another one. And then there's 71 other Italian pages that are part of other packages – anyways, not even close to maybe 500 English pages that come with a barebone debian installation.

So, long story short: I'm afraid man can't show you Italian pages that don't exist. It should care about the LANG environment variable being set before you call man:

export LANG=it_IT.utf8
man bash # should open the Italian bash page
man mkfs # should open the English mkfs page, since no Italian page exists

But in my experience that's extremely rarely actually working :-/. I'm not sure fixing that is worth the effort.