The german locale (as well as others) of gnucash 2.4.6 does not seem to work on an amd64 platform. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. I emerged gnucash 2.4.6 on an amd64 platform and enabled german locale (LANG="de_DE.UTF-8" and LANGUAGE="de_DE.UTF-8"). 2. I started gnucash. Actual Results: It prints on the console: gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at configure time. The menus and dialogs are still English; only the account names are German. Expected Results: Both menus, dialogs, and account names should be German (menus and dialogs are influenced by LANGUAGE, the account names by LANG).
It seems that relocation support gets disabled if the installation does not have a common prefix. Most probably this is because econf defines the libraries directory as /usr/lib64 and the configure script expects it to be "/usr/lib" (which links to /usr/lib64) and changes sysconfdir to /etc. Simply adding --enable-binreloc to the configure parameters makes gnucash crash, so there seems to be reason behind the checks. One way to fix that is to replace "econf" in the ebuild by ./configure GUILE_LIBS="${GUILE_LIBS}" ${G2CONF} --prefix=/usr --build=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --host=x86_64-pc-linux-gnu --mandir=/usr/share/man --infodir=/usr/share/info --localstatedir=/var/lib Note that this installs config files to /usr/etc. However, I found out that my main problem was that I forgot to set LINGUAS="de" in make.conf. Even without the above fix, now I can start gnucash using LANGUAGE="de_DE" gnucash and see German dialogs and menus. The standard buttons still have English text and the message gnc.bin-Message: main: binreloc relocation support was disabled at configure time. still appears.
This is invalid then as relocation is not related with this problem and you were not setting needed variables to get translations working