OS X: Changing the language shown in menus and dialogs

The Finder and applications included with Mac OS X v10.1 or later can display menus and dialog text in any of these languages:

• English
• Japanese
• French
• German
• Spanish
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Portugal) -- Mac OS X v10.5 or later only
• Dutch
• Swedish
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Danish
• Finnish
• Russian -- Mac OS X v10.5 or later only
• Polish -- Mac OS X v10.5 or later only
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Korean
• Arabic -- OS X Lion v10.7 or later only
• Czech -- OS X Lion v10.7 or later only
• Hungarian -- OS X Lion v10.7 or later only
• Turkish -- OS X Lion v10.7 or later only
• Thai -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Catalan -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Croatian -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Greek -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Hebrew -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Romanian -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Slovak -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only
• Ukrainian -- OS X Lion v10.7.3 or later only

The order of languages used by an application is set in Language & Text preferences (or International preferences in Mac OS X v10.5.8 or earlier). If an application is not localized (translated) for the first language in the list, it will use the next available language in the list.

You can add languages to the Language & Text preferences list by clicking the Edit List button that appears below to the list. If you drag a language to the top of the list that is not one of the languages listed above, the Finder and applications included with Mac OS X will not display text in that language, but any other software you might have installed that has been localized for that language should be able to.