> Locale is a collection of files in some predefined directory (it
> depends on the Linux distribution) On Debian there's a package called
> "locales", after you install it with "apt-get install locales",
> "locale -a" lists much more locales than only C and POSIX.
>
> For example I have following locales:
> C
> POSIX
> de_DE
> de_DE.iso88591
> de_DE.iso885915@euro

...

Took me a while to find out which combinations do work and which don't
with Blackdown Java 1.4.2 unser SuSE 8.1. JVM options do not work at all.
Things like LC_CTYPE=ISO-8859-1 neither. Setting LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO-8859-1
or LC_ALL=de_DE.ISO-8859-1 (even though these locales do not even appear
with "locale -a") do work and make Java/Jaybird do the correct
translations (= no translations) from the DB.

Thanks to everybody who helped!

Andreas