Change system language

Question

I have a craft installation (that's up to date), that was installed with english as the system language. Now that Craft has quite a lot of system languages, is there a way to change to another language for the control panel?

Answer 1

If you're running Craft Personal or Client, you'll need to go to the craft_locales table in your database and change the locale to one of the support Craft control panel translations (http://buildwithcraft.com/help/cp-languages).

If you're running Craft Pro, you can go to Settings->Locales and add (and re-order) new locales to your site. Then you can go to your user account settings and set your preferred locale from list of existing site locales and the CP will display in that. Again assuming it's one of the locales that the control panel has already been translated into.

Answer 2

This solutions works for any locale, even if you don't have it installed as a front-end locale. It also works for Personal or Client Craft installs.

Add a translations file into craft/translations/xx.php named after the currently selected user locale or system locale for Craft Personal installs and use this code to include any locale's translations you want. You can also customize it further by overwriting select translations:

<?php
namespace Craft;

if (craft()->request->isCpRequest())
{
    $en = (include '../craft/app/translations/en_us.php');
    $custom = array(
        'Globals' => 'I freak out!',
    );

    return array_merge($en, $custom);
}

return array();