On Feb 21, 2008, at 10:55, Charlse Darwin wrote:

How do I specify the language? (overriding the ENV only for certain ports)

To specify the language for a command-line program to use, you set the "LANG" environment variable to a valid locale, such as those listed in /usr/share/locale or /opt/local/share/locale. Then the program will use that locale, if it installed files for that locale. To answer the question in your subject line - how to save space by not installing localized versions - some ports provide a variant to disable nls (natural language support) and when you do that, the ports won't install any language files and you'll get the default language instead, which is almost always English. However, most ports won't have a variant to disable nls, because disk space is pretty cheap today so it's almost silly not to install the nls files always.