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    How does Pidgin for Windows determine which language to use? ¶

    For the user who installed Pidgin, the language selected during
    installation will be the default. This can be overridden by setting
    the PIDGINLANG environment variable (for example, PIDGINLANG=de). If
    neither of these are specified, it will fall back to the default
    Windows user locale setting.

But in general setting an environment variable is not very user friendly
for an GUI program.

Why we do not offer a Language menu for Pidgin on Windows? In Skype for
instance there is a menu item for the language selection. If it's not
possible to switch the language at runtime we could make a hint, that
the new language will be active after restarting Pidgin.

The current method of selecting the Pidgin language on installation time
has some drawbacks, e.g.:

    * The user may not find his language in the Windows installer.
      Currently I see 72 *.po files in pidgin-mtn/po/ but only 37 *.nsh
      files in pidgin-mtn/pidgin/win32/nsis/translations/.
    * Not every user selects his language carefully during setup. Some
      will probably run the setup in English but want to use the own
      language later.
    * The second method of setting the PIDGINLANG variable is not
      user-friendly.

Greetings,
Björn