Missing text in GTK apps like XMMS, audacity and etc.

Today I was explaining how I solved the missing text issue in "World of Padman" installer to my colleagues and they said they are facing the same issue in XMMS. I asked them to change their locale language settings to en_US and it works. I googled for the problem and found lot of people(mostly Indians) suffers because of this locale(e.g. en_IN) problem.

Problem with internationalized(gettext) application

I was trying to install "Word of Padman" on my laptop which runs Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon. I downloaded 500+mb of file "worldofpadman.run" and ran it. It verified the package and shows the installation wizard but no text in any of controls in the dialog. I made a post in Ubuntu forum and also mailed World of Padman support people but didn't get any reply. So I started troubleshooting myself. First of all the ".run" is made by makeself and the installation wizard written in gtk and glade. I also found that the installer is using gettext for internationalization. Then I did a strace on the installer and found that its trying to open setup.mo(gettext binary file) for my locale which is "en_IN". Since there is no language file(setup.mo) for my locale it shows all gtk controls without any text.

So I changed my language temporarily(export LANG="en_US") and relaunched the installer. Now everything is fine, all controls shows proper text. I faced the same problem in Tremulous installer so now I am happy I can install Tremulous too.