Is it possible that you don't have is_IS language support? On Ubuntu this comes from a package like language-pack-is-base. I tried your po entries in a file named po/is.po, and it didn't work. When I installed language-pack-is-base, it did. $ unset LANGUAGE LC_MESSAGES; export LANG=is_IS.UTF-8 $ /usr/local/jepler/git/bin/git status | head -1 # A greininni master Comparing the bad strace with the good, and excluding ENOENT opens, it's the presence of the is_IS language pack that is the first difference. @@ -1,4 +1,8 @@ open("/usr/share/locale/locale.alias", O_RDONLY) = 3 +open("/usr/lib/locale/is_IS.utf8/LC_MESSAGES", O_RDONLY) = 3 +open("/usr/lib/locale/is_IS.utf8/LC_MESSAGES/SYS_LC_MESSAGES", O_RDONLY) = 3 +open("/usr/lib/locale/is_IS.utf8/LC_CTYPE", O_RDONLY) = 3 open("share/locale/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 14 open("share/locale/is/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 15 open("share/locale/is/LC_MESSAGES/", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC) = 16 +open("/usr/local/jepler/git/share/locale/is/LC_MESSAGES/git.mo", O_RDONLY) = 12 Jeff -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html