Many of the messages from the Unix commands are available in different languages. This is controlled by the LANG environment variable, the default being En_US meaning English in the US. All the default messages have a message number associated with them, e.g.:
$ cat no-such-file
cat: 0652-050 Cannot open no-such-file.
If you prefer the terser Unix-looking error message, set your environment variable LC_MESSAGES to C, and you will get:
$ cat no-such-file
cat: Cannot open no-such-file.
By default LC_MESSAGES is the same as your environment LANG. Setting LANG does also work, but should be avoided since it changes app-defaults lookup etc. See locale(): LC_ALL
From: Bjorn P. Brox <brox@corena.n>