Gmail Available in Many Different Languages   4/8/2008 - 766 views, 1 Comment

You may not think about your fellow readers of The Internet Patrol when you settle down to read our reports, but you’re a globally-distributed group of people, with subscribers from many countries and readers from many more. And there’s no way of knowing how many of our readers have migrated, juggling one or more adopted languages and a mother tongue, depending on the situation. The Gmail developers have gone out of their way to make it easy for the multi-lingual (and, to be fair, mono-lingual non-English speakers) to adapt their Gmail language interface to their Gmail email content.

Gmail offers, at the time of writing, 42 language options. These are:

Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, UK English, US English, Ukrainian, or Vietnamese.

The only caveat is that not all Gmail features available in the English language setting are available in all languages, but the developers are working to bring identical capabilities to all language options.

To configure the Gmail interface to your language, log into your Gmail account and follow these steps:

1. Click the settings link (up in the top right hand corner of any Gmail page.)
2. The first option at the top of the General tab is ‘Language’, and the drop-down box contains the available Gmail display languages. Pick one.
3. Click ‘Save Changes’ to store your selection.

That’s all there is to it. It’s certainly a whole lot easier than getting hold of a Babel fish, isn’t it?