How to search in another language than the system language?

In the Terminal, type:

gksu gedit /usr/share/libtranslate/services.xml

List item

In the file, make this line of code bold in the google section of the gedit file.

<language to="it" tag="en"/> `

When I looked in gedit, the language you want to change looks like this "*", so you still need to change that part to "it", but the rest is done for you.

After this, restart language translator from the dash. After you have done this, resart gnome-translate. Next, try it out with this code: echo"Hope this helps. Good luck." | translate-bin -s google -f it -t en.

I am unsure how deep you want to delve into this, but I'll give it a shot at an answer.

It seems a quick and dirty way to change the search would be change the messages locale temporarily.

From terminal (before using lens, and while it is up):

LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8

Close the terminal and it should go back to your default.

Or before the application(if you want to run the lens from command line I guess).

I have looked at the source code for the '__ init __.py' for the actual lens (it was written in python) there are two lines, which check your locale messages, they get it from the system, but I am unsure what you would need to change to get it to be set to multi languages.It is grabbing the locale to determine which wikipedia (en,fr,de,it, etc.) to search.

More stuff below, which may be helpful

(from the '__ init __.py' in the lens package)

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_MESSAGES, '') loc = locale.getlocale(locale.LC_MESSAGES)[0].split("_")[0]

(line 28 and 29)

wiki= http://%s.wikipedia.org % (loc)

(line 31)

(Explanation of code: the locale is being checked from LC_MESSAGES on system, it is being put into a variable called (loc), which is then split to grab the first portion of the language code (something like 'en_US.UTF-8') for English the result would be 'en', French 'fr', etc. It then takes this variable, and puts it into the %s in the wiki variable before the .wikipedia.org)

It seems like the developer of the lens was probably the person who wrote this entry in the developer section. (the code looks the same)

If you wanted to hard code a language in, it looks like you could do that as well.

You could make a custom lens for Wikipedia and change the locale (or have multiple locales if you wanted to program it in somehow)

http://developer.ubuntu.com/2012/04/how-to-create-a-wikipedia-unity-lens-for-ubuntu/

You will then need to restart for these changes to take effect.

Just an idea: add Wikipedia (en) in firefox's list of search engines: go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page then click the small arrow in the search engines drop list and choose Add "Wikipedia (en)".
Sorry this answer may only expand searches to Wikipedia (en) only, not to all English sources. If it works you could add the same way any other localized search engine you'd like.

Further more I believe you need to have the ubuntu firefox plugin(s) installed and activated. Not sure at all as I disable/remove all that unity lenses web integration stuff.