Das Werkstatt

[PROBLEM]
When running KDE applications in non-KDE environments, they're defaulting to English. I've found information about which packages to install to access the KDE system settings (e.g. install package "systemsettings"), but I didn't want to install too many KDE libraries, apps, etc. just to run a single application in another language (e.g. German).

Thanks to the KDE System Administration documentation about Localization, I've found out that the environment variable "KDE_LANG" can be used for exactly that purpose:

KDE_LANG:
Allows you to override the KDE language configuration. For example, "KDE_LANG=fr kprogram &" starts a program in French if the necessary files are installed.

However, you must at least install the language-support package for the desired language - e.g. "language-pack-kde-de" for German.

[SOLUTION]
So in order to start e.g. "k3b" in German, you start it with the right value for KDE_LANG: If you generally want all KDE apps to be german, it's better and more convenient to add KDE_LANG to your profile configuration:

~/.profile - for per-user settings
/etc/profile - for a systemwide setting

Just add the following line to either one of those files: