Locale Settings

While Gnucash was written in american english, there are many translations available. This page shows, how to adjust them.

System settings

In general GnuCash uses the system settings of your computer. So that should be your first choice to adjust them. But there are some cases, e.g. as a translator, where you wish to tweak them. Usually this is done by setting environment variables, but this depends on your operating system.

LANG vs LANGUAGE

It may be that both variables are not always required. It depends on the system. It does no harm to set both of them and this ensures that the language is really set.

Changing the Language on Linux

In either case, you can easily switch between the various languages the gnucash has available by placing the LANG env var before the call to the executable:

LANG=pt_BR /opt/gnucash-svn/bin/gnucash

Changing the Language on Windows

If you are running GnuCash 2.4.0 (or newer) on Windows, you can set the interface language by editing the file "environment" in the folder "C:\Program Files\gnucash\etc\gnucash" (or wherever you installed GnuCash into). If you want to change the default language to English, you should un-comment the following lines (remove # sign to un-comment) at the end of that file

LANG=en_US
LANGUAGE={LANG}

Note that the second line should remain as-is. The braces are a variable expansion of the LANG variable.

The Language lines in your Environment folder should look like this (change language variables based on desired language):

LANG=fr_CA
LANGUAGE={LANG}

(Older GnuCash versions had to change the file "gnucash.cmd" in the folder "C:\Program Files\gnucash\bin" (or wherever you installed GnuCash into). In those older versions, you had to add lines saying set LANGUAGE=en_US and set LANG=en_US to the end of the file.)

Changing the Language on OSX

GnuCash 2.4.0 or newer

If you are running GnuCash 2.4.0 (or newer) on OSX, you can set the interface language by creating/editing the file "environment.sh" in the folder "Gnucash.app/Contents/Resources". You can get there by right clicking on the Application and choosing "Show Package Contents" and then navigating to "Contents" and then "Resources".

Create a file named "environment.sh" with the following lines (change language variables based on desired language):

export LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 
export LANGUAGE=nl_NL.UTF-8

GnuCash 2.2.9 and older

On OSX, a good place to set your language preference is in the file "Gnucash" in "Gnucash.app/Contents/MacOS". You can get there by right clicking on the Application and choosing "Show Package Contents" and then navigating to "Contents" and then "MacOS". Change this file such that the last few lines are (change language variables based on desired language):

export LANG=nl_NL.UTF-8 
export LANGUAGE=nl_NL.UTF-8
$EXEC "$bundle_contents/MacOS/$name-bin" $* $EXTRA_ARGS