Apple KBase Article - Apple Posts Notes On Mac OS X's Multilanguage Support

by , 12:00 PM EST, January 28th, 2003

Apple has added a new article to the Knowledge Base explaining OS X's ability to use many different languages. Apple's Knowledge Base (sometimes referred to as the KBase) is a central location for all of Apple's support documents and other important information.

The purpose of this tech article is to simply explain which languages Mac OS X supports, how you work with those languages, and what features are included. From Apple:

TOPIC
Mac OS X 10.2 is a multilingual operating system. You may choose one of several languages for application menus and dialogs. In addition to these base languages, it is also possible to read and write text in several other languages.

Languages included

Mac OS X 10.2 can display Finder menus, System Preferences, and file names in the following languages:

• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Finnish
• French
• Korean
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Swedish

You may select and prioritize languages in the System Preferences application. Go to the International pane, and (if necessary) click the Language tab.

Names of certain system-installed items will be translated into the selected language. Your home directory, for example, and its immediate subfolders (such as Music and Documents) appear with localized names when one of the above languages is selected as the preferred language. Folders that are not system installed retain their English names. You may rename user-created folders as desired, but you should not rename folders that were created by the system or by other applications that retain their English names. Examples of folders you should not rename are found at ~/Library and ~/Library/Preferences/.

Selecting a keyboard layout or input method
To type text in a given language, you may need to select a keyboard layout or input method for it. Click the Input Menu tab of the International preference pane to locate these options. Keyboards layouts designated as Unicode are only available for Unicode applications such as Mail, TextEdit, or the Finder.

There is much more information about things such as application awareness, fonts, Unicode input methods, and more in the full Knowledge Base article at Apple's Web site.

The Mac Observer Spin:

This is a handy reference for the next time you are asked, or are wondering, if Mac OS X supports this or that language. For that reason alone, let alone the handy tips included, we are pleased that this article was added to the KBase.

Apple Knowledge Base