tl;dr:
$ LANGUAGE=nl_NL.UTF-8 LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_ALL=nl_NL.UTF-8 gnucash
(change into the locale codes of your choice)
I know I'm a bit late to the game, but I was also running into issues with languages.
As an extra, I really want to keep my system locale at en_C.UTF-8
/ C
because the Dutch language prescribes a comma for decimal separator and completely messes with day-to-day programming tasks (especially in LibreOffice). So I need GnuCash to run in 'translation mode'.
Anyway, running
$ LANGUAGE=nl_NL.UTF-8 LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 gnucash
did not work for me either (just runs in English). Then, I found this link (accessed on Aug 19, 2015) about locale settings in GnuCash.
In the section 'OS dependend tweaking', at the end of the 'Changing the Language on Linux' sub-section, they hinted to also specify the LC_ALL
environment variable:
If you can get the graphical interface in the correct language , but you can't get the accounts in the desired locale, you have to add the LC_ALL variable, like in the following example:
LANG=it_IT.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=it_IT.UTF8 LC_ALL=it_IT.UTF-8 gnucash
This does the trick for me:
$ LANGUAGE=nl_NL.UTF-8 LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 LC_ALL=nl_NL.UTF-8 gnucash
Perhaps this might work for you:
$ LANGUAGE=ar_SY LANG=ar_SY LC_ALL=ar_SY gnucash