Is it Esperanto?

John Varela

John Varela

Registered
I just installed Mountain Lion and now when I enter the App Store and click "Updates" the authorization pane says, and I quote:

"App Store esta intentant comprovar si hi ha programari nou subministrat per Apple. Type an Administrator's name and password to allow this."

What the hell?
 
No, not esperanto.
Esperanto would be more like "App Store provas kontroli por novaj programaro havigita de Apple.

You can go to translate.google.com, paste in that phrase, then click the "auto-detect" button
It shows the English translation from that phrase, which is in Catalan.
Translates correctly to "App Store is trying to check for new software provided by Apple."

The window was partly Catalan, and the last sentence is English, of course, so, it's some kind of glitch in the system.
Do you see mixed language like that (or other language "strangeness") anywhere else?
 
Last edited:
I didn't know that Google Translate will identify the language for you.

Yes, I see the first sentence in Catalan and the second in English in all authorization boxes. I hadn't noticed it anywhere except in Update because I've long since stopped looking at much less reading the text in those repetitive boxes. I guess I'll give this as feedback to Apple, though surely I won't be the first to report it.
 
Correction: I just got an authorization box that's all in English. So some are partly in Catalan and some aren't and I don't know which is when.
 
I think it would be more interesting, if in fact, all glitchy message like that are part-Catalan, and no other language.

I did notice that you didn't actually ask about fixing that, so I'll offer that fix, irrespective of your wishes, of course :D

Particularly if this was an upgrade on an existing system -
Boot to your Recovery System partition (Restart while holding Command-R), and run Disk Utility. Do a Repair Disk, both after selecting your boot partition, and again after selecting the hard drive (the line with the HD manufacturer's info). Disk Utility performs a different set of tests on each.
Then, run a Permissions repair. Restart your Mac, to return to your normal desktop.

Check the various places where you can change the language. Make sure those places have your local language set.
I don't assume that your chosen language is English (and you didn't say which)
I think the best place to look is in the System Preferences/Language & Text pane.
Make sure your chosen language is at the top of the language list. No harm in clicking the Edit List... button, and un-checking other languages than your chosen language. Click the Formats tab, and make sure that the Region tab is for YOUR region.

Restart your Mac.
If the text language issue persists - Restart to your Recovery Partition, and reinstall Mountain Lion (again)
 
DeltaMac said:
> I think it would be more interesting, if in fact, all glitchy message like that are part-Catalan, and no other language.

> I did notice that you didn't actually ask about fixing that, so I'll offer that fix, irrespective of your wishes, of course :D

> Particularly if this was an upgrade on an existing system -

It was an upgrade done the hard way: I maintain a Time Machine backup. To that add two SuperDuper! clones on separate drives, just to be safe. Boot from one of the clones and erase the system disk. Install the new OS from a fourth disk -- in this instance, a thumb drive. Then migrate from one of the clones.

> Boot to your Recovery System partition (Restart while holding Command-R),

Maybe that was the way in 10.7, which I skipped. In 10.8 it is boot while holding the Option key. Which makes more sense.

> and run Disk Utility. Do a Repair Disk, both after selecting your boot partition,
> and again after selecting the hard drive (the line with the
> HD manufacturer's info). Disk Utility performs a different set of tests on each.
> Then, run a Permissions repair. Restart your Mac, to return to your normal desktop.

I seriously doubt Disk Repair or Permissions Repair, especially the latter, would do any good. But I had all those clones and the Installer handy so I ran Verify on the disk and permissions and got clean results.

> Check the various places where you can change the language. Make sure those
> places have your local language set. I don't assume that your chosen language
> is English (and you didn't say which) I think the best place to look is in the System
> Preferences/Language & Text pane. Make sure your chosen language is at the top
> of the language list. No harm in clicking the Edit List... button, and un-checking
> other languages than your chosen language. Click the Formats tab, and make sure
> that the Region tab is for YOUR region.

> Restart your Mac.

I unchecked Catalan from the list but haven't restarted because then I would lose all this typing. If restarting does effect a cure I'll report back here. I don't know of any other place where I tell the OS about language.

> If the text language issue persists - Restart to your Recovery Partition, and reinstall
> Mountain Lion (again)
Click to expand...

You gotta be kidding. After spending a couple of days upgrading, updating, and configuring I'm not going to reinstall from scratch unless I really, really have to.

Well, thanks for trying. I've reported this to Apple Feedback and hope the next OS update will correct it. In any case it's not been a real problem yet, just a curious anomaly.

John
 
I didn't say a word about reinstalling from scratch...

But, you could try the same 'fix' that has been used for a variety of odd glitches that appear in the system - and has been shown to be useful for at least the last ten years. That fix is to download the current combined updater for your system, and install that. It often will do a form of repair install, and the hope is that those strange glitches will disappear.
Or, booting to your recovery partition, and reinstalling OS X - NOT an install from scratch, but simply reinstalling Mountain Lion. That performs a function very similar to the older Archive & Install that used to be available as an option when running the OS X installer. That separate option no longer exists - but the result is the same. You get a "freshened" install of OS X, basically replacing the existing system - without losing your own files and settings, or requiring a reinstall of all your other stuff, or retrieving files from a backup.
That being said, there's also no harm to make sure that you have a current backup before you would begin a potential fix. It all generally proceeds quite safely,

Finally, just something to consider - I'm just thinking that a glitch in a security authentication window may not be just the minor anomaly that you think it is, and the reload (reinstall) of OS X might weed out that issue for good.
 
DeltaMac said:
I didn't say a word about reinstalling from scratch...
Click to expand...

No, but you did say "Particularly if this was an upgrade on an existing system." I was clarifying what I did.

DeltaMac said:
But, you could try the same 'fix' that has been used for a variety of odd glitches that appear in the system - and has been shown to be useful for at least the last ten years. That fix is to download the current combined updater for your system, and install that. It often will do a form of repair install, and the hope is that those strange glitches will disappear.

Or, booting to your recovery partition, and reinstalling OS X - NOT an install from scratch, but simply reinstalling Mountain Lion. That performs a function very similar to the older Archive & Install that used to be available as an option when running the OS X installer. That separate option no longer exists - but the result is the same. You get a "freshened" install of OS X, basically replacing the existing system - without losing your own files and settings, or requiring a reinstall of all your other stuff, or retrieving files from a backup.
That being said, there's also no harm to make sure that you have a current backup before you would begin a potential fix. It all generally proceeds quite safely,

Finally, just something to consider - I'm just thinking that a glitch in a security authentication window may not be just the minor anomaly that you think it is, and the reload (reinstall) of OS X might weed out that issue for good.
Click to expand...

Cleaning up crud was the point of wiping the disk before installing. However, the combined updater might be worth doing. First I have to make a backup of the current configuration. I'll get back to you.
 
You did what I (and what most others on this forum) would call a nuke and pave - format, reinstall the system, and restore from backup.

A system upgrade, to me, means just that - an upgrade install.
An upgrade install is just for the system, and would not "need" a restore and reinstall of all your 'stuff'
That may not be your preferred method, and that's fine!
The combined updater, however, is in my experience a much safer process, which I choose to do as a FINAL step, after all updates, and after restoring/reinstalling all your files and apps - and getting somewhere close to whatever your normal setup actually is. The system should already be fully up-to-date. At that point, re-running the combined OS X updater does something like a repair - checking that all system files with updates are in place, and - to some extent - resetting system caches. It sort of brings together everything in a last step. You could call it a "system calibration". My experience has been that system performance often is noticeably improved, and the occasional odd glitch that shows up may be gone after that re-update, and is a great step to try to "smooth over" those bumps that might be just minor annoyances.
 
I didn't see much point to reinstalling, since it was (presumably) the OS X 10.8.2 Installer that created this in the first place. So I tried the Combo Updater and that didn't help.

Thanks for your help.
 
As you say, it may just be a minor problem, and may not affect anything - other than a few dialog windows that don't read properly.

I haven't read about other folks that have the same problem - SO, I would say that the problem was not created by the 10.8.2 installer, but by some anomaly in your software - and I think it should be fixable with a few simple tasks.

Run an app that specializes in clearing out the various system caches, (including font caches), such as YASU, or OnyX.

But, first -
Log in to a different user, and check that same odd language issue does NOT exist in another user account. If you don't have another user account, you can create one just for this purpose. That will tell you that the issue is in just your user account, and not system-wide. If it is only the one user, that simplifies things quite a lot.
 
DeltaMac said:
As you say, it may just be a minor problem, and may not affect anything - other than a few dialog windows that don't read properly.

I haven't read about other folks that have the same problem - SO, I would say that the problem was not created by the 10.8.2 installer, but by some anomaly in your software - and I think it should be fixable with a few simple tasks.

Run an app that specializes in clearing out the various system caches, (including font caches), such as YASU, or OnyX.

But, first -
Log in to a different user, and check that same odd language issue does NOT exist in another user account. If you don't have another user account, you can create one just for this purpose. That will tell you that the issue is in just your user account, and not system-wide. If it is only the one user, that simplifies things quite a lot.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion; something I should have thought of myself. I switched to the Admin account and its authorization pane is clean.

My copy of Onyx doesn't work on anything past 10.5 so I'll have to go get a current version.
 
It turns out there is no Onyx after 10.6 so I fetched and ran YASU to no avail. I'm ready to give up and live with it. But I would like to know how that happened.
 
Turns out you're incorrect about OnyX.
Where did YOU look?
Not at the OnyX developer site:
There's separate OnyX versions for each OS X version, back as far as Jaguar (OS X 10.2)
Go here for a 10.8 version of OnyX
http://www.titanium.free.fr/downloadonyx.php

Now that you know that it's somewhere in your user folder -
You may have to manually look through your various settings files in your own user folder.
I looked around a little, but I have nearly 1,000 files in Preference alone.
Could be one of a number of common files that I find related to a lot of issues - Your user Library/Preferences/com.apple.BezelServices.plist
or same folder/com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
or /com.apple.systemuiserver.plist
or some different preference file. (phew! lots of files there)

or, continue on with ignoring it. :D
 
Okay, problem solved. First let me describe some more peculiar behavior:

Since the mixed-language panes occurred only when trying to open a locked System Preference and only in my user account, it seemed obvious that the problem lay in a corrupted pointer somewhere. This sent me back to the "Language & Text" preferences. I thought if I reset the pointers and then restored them, that might clear the problem. So I switched the preferred language to French and rebooted, and all the authorization panes were now completely in French. The Catalan was gone. So was English, mostly. Some things remained in English, such as the "Are you sure you want to restart the computer now?" warning pane, which was always in English no matter what I did. This was encouraging, so next I switched the preference back to U.S. English, and restarted. Surprise! The Catalan was gone and instead the authorization pane was mixed French and English. I tried switching to Spanish and other Englishes, but could not get the French to go away. The last thing I tried was returning to all French, then back to U.S. English. And damned if the French wasn't gone and the Catalan was back.

I think Apple needs to work on this particular new feature in 10.8. I checked 10.6 and the authorization panes there are only one sentence. 10.8 uses two sentences. The second sentence is invariant and was always in whatever the chosen language was; it was only the first sentence that was wrong. And the buttons at the bottom. The Cancel button was usually but not always in English, while the OK button mimicked the language of the wrong-language sentence.

Finally, I did the right thing. In the "Language and Text" preferences I went to the Edit List page and unchecked every language but U.S. English. That cleared it all up. No more French, no more Catalan. Whew.

Thanks again for all your suggestions.
 
In the Languages section of System Preferences, what is the current order?
English should be on the top (assuming you want to have your system in English, if not, drag whatever language you prefer on top).
After that, in descending order.
By default all apps come in several languages. If an app is localized in the language that is first on your list, the app will behave in that language. If it's not localized in that language, it'll try the next one, until it finds the localization. Sometimes some parts of an app may have missing strings for localization. Some parts may have been translated, and some other parts may come from the system, not the app. Or for an older app, some strings may still come in other languages if something is missing.
*If* the first language on your list is English, this shouldn't be the case, unless some resources are missing from the app/apps in question.
They could be missing for random reasons - corruption, incomplete install, some form of delocalization process gone wrong etc.
 
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