R 2.1.0 GUI language

Thanks for your prompt reply.

Which OS is this?  PLEASE do read the posting guide.

Win XP, SP2 (German), which I forgot to mention despite heaving read the 
guide.

This *is* documented in the `R Installation and Adminstration' Manual, 
section `Internationalization'.

Looked in the wrong place (and the help isn't globally searchable).

If your OS is set to German, then why don't you expect R to follow?

I'd just like to have an option to change the language. English is my 
working language and the common denominator of my tool chain. German 
warning messages probably also wouldn't be much help to me when asking 
for help on this list.
By the way, I'd be quite afraid to suddenly see the German decimal comma 
  instead of point in my program output, but fortunately R isn't that 
localized.

If you don't want German menus, do you want German months (as has 
happened for many versions).

For Windows or Linux, to just change the language of messages, set 
environment variable LANGUAGE=en.  To set all aspects, set LC_ALL=en.  I 
don't know about MacOS X menus.

LC_ALL doesn't seem to change the message language. LC_MESSAGES,
which is mentioned  in the installation and administration guide,
doesn't seem to exist in R 2.1.0 and isn't listed in the locales help.

I helped myself by putting
Sys.putenv("LANGUAGE"="EN");Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","EN")
into etc/Rprofile. Don't know if this is the default way to go.

Stephan