Currently our man(1) utility search manages only in $lang_country.charset, $lang.charset and, as failover, in $en.charset which is historical behavior.
But nowadays most of ported software uses only $lang subdirectories for translated manpages instead of use full locale notation, for example, share/ja/man1, share/de/man1, share/ru/man1. In such cases, our man(1) utility cannot find any translated manpages and silently fallback to english version.
Add $man_lang in search path allows man(1) search and use translated manpages under historical and modern path traditions