bug#8090: strerror(1) and strsignal(1)?

[Pádraig Brady]

You might consider setting the locale etc.
to get localised strings.

However this was considered before and discounted as overkill:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2010-01/msg00060.html

Personally I use this in my ~/.bashrc

strerror() { python -c "\
import os,locale as l; l.setlocale(l.LC_ALL, ''); print os.strerror($1)"; }

cheers,
Pádraig.