Midnight Commander Menus in Bulgarian (guess!)

Hi,

I have an old 3.2 knoppix Debian install on a Laptop.

There seems to be a file defining the language used in the console which is used when MC starts. The Help line is in some kind of Cyrillic script and the menus all comprise question marks : "????:???????? ???????? ????"

This hasn't really such a problem as Icewm and X are correctly rendered.

However, when I tried to install firefox under the X server, the options were all presented to me in a middle European language, possibly Czech or Bulgarian.

Please don't advise me to use append "lang=us", etc, as I have gone down all these obvious routes witrh no success.

Any clues?