Thank you Soren and Manual.

My spanish failed because I was using LC_ALL=es_ES instead of
LC_ALL=es_ES.ISO8859-1.

Then I had a mix of locale environment variables set to different locales.
At first, I was trying some Spanish and it wasn't working, so then I tried
Swedish but it didn't work because I had some variables still set to
Spanish at same time. (I was able to reproduce this.)

Now to get bash to give its messages in Spanish too. (I can guess I need
choose locales in the configuration and rebuild from source.)

   Jeremy C. Reed

   http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/