We in Switzerland are proud about the fact that our country has four official languages: Italian, French, German and Romansh. Most of Swiss people speak at least two of them, plus the inofficial fifth language (English).

Eclipse is even better than that and speaks 46 different languages. If you are not happy with the default language, try out Babel! And yes, Eclipse has a language pack for Klingon too:

🙂

In this tutorial I’m using Eclipse Oxygen (MCUXpresso IDE), but with Babel you can ‘localize’ older Eclipse releases as Neon or Mars with Babel.

First, use the menu Help > Install New Software and use the following update site:

http://download.eclipse.org/technology/babel/update-site/R0.15.1/oxygen

(change ‘oxygen’ to your Eclipse version)

Then select the language packs you want to install and you are ready to go:

By default, Eclipse tries to use the host operating system language (locale) if that language pack is installed. So if you are having an Eclipse with the Chinese Language pack installed, and you are running it say on a Windows machine configured to use Chinese, it will show Eclipse in Chinese:

To force eclipse to use a language, use the -nl parameter for example use

eclipse.exe -nl en

(fr: French, en: English, zh: Simplified Chinese, ja: Japanese, tl: Klingon, el: Greek, see OS Language Codes). Or check the codes after nl_ in the plugins directory:

One common way is to add this to the shortcut on Windows:

Not everything is translated, so still some menus or text will be in English:

Menu in Greek:

Menu in French:

Or in German:

Summary

With the Eclipse Babel Language packages, I can add extra language support for the user interface. Not everything might be translated, as this is an ongoing community effort. But if you would like to learn a new language or are more comfortable to see your native language, go ahead and try the Babel packages. To force a language, use the -nl Eclipse startup command line parameter.

Happy Babeling 🙂

Links

• Eclipse Babel Project: https://www.eclipse.org/babel/
• How to start Eclipse in local language: http://www.eclipse.org/articles/Article-Speak-The-Local-Language/article.html
• Language codes: https://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/docs/appendix/OSLangCodes.htm