By default, mysqld produces error messages in English, but they can also be displayed in any of these other languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Norwegian-ny, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, or Swedish.

To start mysqld with a particular language for error messages, use the --language or -L option. The option value can be a language name or the full path to the error message file. For example:

shell> mysqld --language=swedish

Or:

shell> mysqld --language=/usr/local/share/swedish

The language name should be specified in lowercase.

By default, the language files are located in the share/LANGUAGE directory under the MySQL base directory.

You can also change the content of the error messages produced by the server. Details can be found in the MySQL Internals manual, available at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Internals_Error_Messages. If you upgrade to a newer version of MySQL after changing the error messages, remember to repeat your changes after the upgrade.