only english or german descriptions displayed

Despite selecting French (or even Catalan) in gcompris' configuration menu, it displays either German or English item descriptions.

OTOH, I hear the french voices (coming from package gcompris-sound-fr) -- only when I select French in the config menu, which is reasonable.

Note that changing the language in the menu has no effect until the next start. So you need to exit gcompris for language changes to have an effect. This is annoying, and the menu should mention this until it's possible to dynamically change languages (a minor bug).

$ gcompris
** (gcompris:9867): WARNING **: config_file /home/hoehle/.gcompris/gcompris.conf
** Message: gcompris_set_locale 'fr_FR.UTF-8'

Here's an example where I selected Catalan and added a LANG variable upon start to see if that would have an effect.
$ LANG=fr_FR gcompris&
[1] 9273
(gcompris:9273): Gtk-WARNING **: Locale not supported by C library.
        Using the fallback 'C' locale.
** (gcompris:9273): WARNING **: config_file /home/hoehle/.gcompris/gcompris.conf
** Message: gcompris_set_locale 'ca_ES.UTF-8'
^ ^ ^ Catalan is what I selected in gcompris' menu

open /dev/sequencer: No such file or directory
Opened audio at 44100 Hz 16 bit stereo, 2048 bytes audio buffer
__main__:1: DeprecationWarning: Module gnome.canvas is deprecated; please import gnomecanvas instead

My system's default locale is German. When I select German, I indeed see German item descriptions.
$ gcompris &
** (gcompris:9577): WARNING **: config_file /home/hoehle/.gcompris/gcompris.conf
** Message: gcompris_set_locale 'de_DE.UTF-8'

In all other cases I tried, I see English descriptions.

This situation is worse from Breezy, where most descriptions worked in French, and only some item's descriptions where displayed in English. I don't know why, I looked at the XML files containing the descriptions and they looked ok. That's a bug I had not reported so far.

To my surprise, locale -a only reports
$ locale -a
C
de_AT.utf8
de_BE.utf8
de_CH.utf8
de_DE.utf8
de_LU.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX
in Dapper, whereas the list was much much longer (including fr_FR.xyz and iso88591 entries) in Breezy.

I don't have lang-pack-fr[-base] installed in Dapper, but IMHO this shouldn't affect the independent package gcompris, should it?

Using gcompris-7.2-1ubuntu6