How to get English error messages on a localized Ubuntu?

Have you ever noticed that oftentimes people in anglophone forums will almost be offended if someone quotes an error message in their local language? Well, on one hand I can understand it, on the other I see more value in providing a copied+pasted error message in whatever language rather than some machine-translated abomination which makes it incomprehensible to readers trying to answer the question and the native speaker posting it alike ¹.

But what if we could simply convince our programs to spit their errors in English and at the same time diagnose an error that is locale-specific? Turns out we can. On Ubuntu the en_US.UTF-8 locale always seems to get installed as a fallback. So if we ran apt-get update as ordinary user, it’d tell us in plain Russian that it can’t acquire a lock:

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ apt-get update
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Невозможно заблокировать каталог /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Не удалось открыть файл блокировки /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Отказано в доступе)
E: Не удалось выполнить блокировку управляющего каталога (/var/lib/dpkg/); у вас есть права суперпользователя?

If we wanted the same phrased in plain English instead, we could set the LANG variable for this single invocation of apt-get.

oliver@rukubuntu:~$ LANG=en_US.UTF-8 apt-get update
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/apt/lists/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock directory /var/lib/apt/lists/
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to lock the administration directory (/var/lib/dpkg/), are you root?

Neat, eh?

// Oliver

1. there is of course still the chance that the OP will be able to provide a sensible translation. [↩]