Cygwin displays error messages in Hebrew and garbled

I have been using Cygwin to build my Android library using the NDK's ndk-build script and Cygwin's 开发者_StackOverflow中文版make tool. It started giving me errors with a bunch of Latin non-English characters. When copying the text to Google, it was pasted as Hebrew (which I can read). Is there any way to force it to output errors in English? Any idea why this happens?

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Check your environment variables for the correct locale. LANG or LC_MESSAGES are probably responsible. Set those to an English locale (in your profile to have that in future sessions as well) to get English error messages. Sorry, I'm a Windows person and know nearly nothing of Unix so you'd have to look up the specifics elsewhere, but this should be the general direction to go.

Some programs/libraries try to be overly smart by guessing the locale from the keyboard layout or the user's locale. And oftentimes ignoring the fact that on Windows locale and UI language are two different concepts (and that different languages on the console are even harder to get right).

As for why the messages appear garbled that's likely because the console window uses the wrong code page. The easiest fix is usually to use a TrueType font for the console window, but in this case neither Consolas nor Lucida Console include glyphs for Hebrew, so you'd only see boxes anyway.