As a Ger­man blog­ger who some­times writes Eng­lish arti­cles with screen­shots from apps in Eng­lish, it was always a lit­tle cum­ber­some to switch the whole sys­tem to Eng­lish to get these screen­shots. But mean­while, there is anoth­er solu­tion for this prob­lem. You can change the lan­guage for sin­gle appli­ca­tions to anoth­er lan­guage, as long as oth­er lan­guages are sup­port­ed by the app.

In the Sys­tem Set­tings, you can find under Gen­er­al → Lan­guage & Region, in the low­er group, the sin­gle entry “Appli­ca­tions.” Press the +-But­ton, and now you can add an appli­ca­tion and choose a dif­fer­ent lan­guage, as long as the app sup­ports dif­fer­ent lan­guages:

Only the lan­guages sup­port­ed by the appli­ca­tion are dis­played in the menu. If no oth­er lan­guage is sup­port­ed, this will be indi­cat­ed. How­ev­er, there might be lan­guages that appear here even though the lan­guage resources are not ful­ly imple­ment­ed by the appli­ca­tion. Obsid­i­an is a bad exam­ple of this, as the Ara­bic set­ting only switch­es from right to left — at least it does this. If you accept the change of lan­guage, the appli­ca­tion will restart and from now on, it will start with that lan­guage until you choose anoth­er one or delete the entry in the list.

You may have noticed that the drop-down box with the lan­guages is in Ger­man, although the user inter­face of the sys­tem exten­sions in the back­ground is in Eng­lish. The rea­son for this is that I switched the sys­tem exten­sions to Eng­lish for this screen­shot, but it didn’t change every UI ele­ment. Nev­er­the­less, switch­ing the lan­guage works even if “Sys­tem Set­tings” do not appear in the list of appli­ca­tions in the lan­guage set­tings.

This is pos­si­ble because you can also switch the appli­ca­tion lan­guages on the com­mand line:

open -a System\ Settings --args -AppleLanguages '(en)'

Additional Remarks

• Ter­mi­nate Run­ning Appli­ca­tions:
  • If the appli­ca­tion does not appear in the desired UI lan­guage, it may still be run­ning in the back­ground. Ter­mi­nate the appli­ca­tion before exe­cut­ing the com­mand to change its lan­guage.
• Using Lan­guage Abbre­vi­a­tions:
  • Pro­grams can be start­ed in oth­er sup­port­ed lan­guages by replac­ing the abbre­vi­a­tion ‘(en)’ with the cor­re­spond­ing coun­try code, e.g., ‘(fr)’ for French or ‘(dk)’ for Dan­ish.
• Tem­po­rary Lan­guage Change:
  • Chang­ing the appli­ca­tion lan­guage using this method is only tem­po­rary. After clos­ing and restart­ing the app, it will start again in the lan­guage set in macOS.
• Apple Short­cuts App:
  • The action names in the Apple Short­cuts app are dis­played in the lan­guage you choose. If you are doing this from a non-Eng­lish macOS set­ting, you need to call the apps by their Eng­lish names.

With Apple appli­ca­tions, you can assume that they sup­port all nec­es­sary lan­guages. For oth­er apps, you can use the ter­mi­nal:

ls -d /Applications/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/*lproj

This lists all sup­port­ed lan­guages like this:

/Applications/Pages.app/Contents/Resources/de.lproj

The deat en.lprojis the coun­try code for Ger­many, which can then be used with one of the two com­mand line vari­ants:

open -a Pages --args -AppleLanguages '(de)'

or

open -a /Applications/Pages.app --args -AppleLanguages '(de)'

Atten­tion: It is essen­tial to ensure that there is only one space before the coun­try code, oth­er­wise the appli­ca­tion will not start in the oth­er lan­guage!

If you are look­ing for one of the stan­dard Apple appli­ca­tions, most of them are now stored in /System/Applications

Shortcuts make life easier

If you are like me, writ­ing and dis­cussing about one spe­cif­ic appli­ca­tion not only in anoth­er lan­guages as the macOS lan­guage, then all these approach­es are still too com­pli­cat­ed, so why not using a short­cut?

In my case this app is the Short­cut app, so I have a short­cut to switch it to Eng­lish:

There are only two actions need­ed:

1. Quit the App
2. Run Shell Script

 In the short­cut “Detail,” I switch the “Pin in Menu Bar” on. You can also assign a key­board short­cut as you wish.

In the case of chang­ing the Short­cut app lan­guage, you can’t use the play but­ton in the app, it doesn’t work.

That’s all for now. I would be very hap­py if you would leave crit­i­cism, com­ments, and sug­ges­tions in the com­ments. Thanks.