Languages

Languages

VLC Redesign speaks 72 languages besides English, each covering every text of the interface, and changes from one to another at once, without a restart. Right-to-left languages are laid out right to left. This page explains where to choose the language, what each language brings, how right to left works, and how to translate.

Complete languages	72, plus English and British English
Other catalogs	37 of VLC's own catalogs, listed as (partial) when they have enough of VLC's texts
Right to left	Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Central Kurdish
Default	English, whatever the language of Windows, until you choose one
Where	Settings → General → Appearance → Interface language, or the installer's Languages page

Choose the language

⋯ → Settings → General → Appearance → Interface language (Ctrl+P).

• The whole interface changes at once: the sidebar, the pages, the player, the settings, the menus and the dialogs (VLC's classic windows the next time they open). There is no restart.
• As for the theme, the new language is kept when Settings closes; the Settings window has no Apply button. Choosing the language in VLC's classic preferences changes it at once too.
• The list starts with Auto (the language of Windows), then the complete languages, each by its own name (Deutsch, Українська, العربية), then the partial ones, marked (partial).
• VLC Redesign starts in English until you choose a language, whatever the language of Windows; Reset all settings comes back to English. The installer can set the language for you (see Install and update).

The language of the subtitles is set apart: see Subtitles and Settings: Subtitles.

The complete languages

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Central Kurdish, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian Bokmål, Norwegian Nynorsk, Occitan, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Latin America), Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Walloon and Welsh.

English comes in two spellings: English (American, VLC's own texts) and British English (shown as English (United Kingdom) in the installer).

VLC's 37 other catalogs (Asturian, Kabyle, Uzbek, Interlingua...) are listed after them, marked (partial): VLC's own texts are translated there, the redesign's stay in English. A catalog with next to nothing translated (under 16 KB) is not listed. The installer offers only the complete languages, so that the app never starts half in English.

Beyond the words, each language gets:

• Plural forms of its own (2 элемента, 5 элементов), and minutes and milliseconds written its way (5 мин, 5 dk, 5 分钟).
• Keyboard keys named as on its keyboards (Entf, Suppr, Canc).
• Fonts of its script: Chinese, Japanese and Korean take the fonts of their language whatever the language of Windows; Hindi and the other Indian scripts, Sinhala, Thai, Lao, Khmer, Myanmar and Ethiopic take the fonts of Windows' own interface.
• Room for longer words: a text too long for its place is shortened with "…" and shown whole in a tooltip, wraps where there is room, or its button, switch, tab or menu widens.

Right to left

Choosing Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Urdu or Central Kurdish lays the interface out right to left at once: everything is mirrored, and the arrows point the way one reads. Each language file says which way it is written, so a new translation can be right to left too.

What does not mirror, on purpose:

• The playback bar keeps its order, as on most players: time runs from left to right on the seek bar, with its times on its sides; Previous, Play and Next, and the volume, are in the same order as in English. Its menus and tooltips are mirrored.
• The volume and the speed grow from left to right, and the subtitle timing runs earlier on the left, later on the right, as the seek bar.

Layout direction

Under the language, Layout direction chooses Left to right or Right to left. It follows the language you choose (a right-to-left language switches it to Right to left), and you can change it: a right-to-left language can stay left to right, as some prefer. Like the language, it changes at once.

The installer asks the same (Right-to-left layout, on its Languages page, shown only for those five languages), and a silent install takes /RIGHTTOLEFT or /LEFTTORIGHT. The portable zip starts in English, left to right.

In the installer

The installer's Languages page (new in 0.3.1) sets two languages before the first start:

• Interface language: any of the complete languages, Setup's own language to begin with.
• Subtitle language: the default language of the subtitles, the interface's until you choose another.

A silent install takes /UILANG= and /SUBLANG= with the codes of the app (he, de, pt_BR, zh_TW...), for example /VERYSILENT /UILANG=he /SUBLANG=en. A copy that already has a language keeps it. Details: Install and update.

Good to know. The interface language is kept in a file named language in the copy's portable folder, not in the registry, so an installed official VLC keeps its own language.

Translate

Anyone can translate VLC Redesign, improve a translation or add a language.

The easiest way: Weblate. Translate in the browser, with a GitHub account or a Weblate one; Weblate shows the context of each text, checks the placeholders and sends the work back as a pull request. It holds the texts VLC Redesign adds; VLC's own texts are translated by VideoLAN. A language that is missing can be asked for there.

Or with the files. The texts are ordinary gettext catalogs (.po), the format VLC uses: any .po editor works (Poedit is free), as does a plain text editor.

1. Get the catalog: po/<code>.po of the repository for an existing language, or a new one from the template po/vlc.pot (msginit -i po/vlc.pot -o po/<code>.po -l <code>, or New from POT in Poedit).
2. Translate the empty entries and those marked fuzzy. Keep the placeholders (%1, %s...), the HTML tags, line breaks and the & of menu accelerators. Set the direction entry (msgctxt "layout direction") to RTL for a right-to-left language.
3. Try it: msgfmt -c --statistics -o vlc.mo po/<code>.po, copy vlc.mo to locale\<code>\LC_MESSAGES\vlc.mo in the folder of VLC Redesign (the portable zip is the easiest), and choose the language in Settings: the interface changes at once. A new language shows in the list by its own name, marked "(partial)", until it is added to the complete ones.
4. Send it: a pull request on GitHub, or the file attached to an issue (the Translation form). Say whether it covers the whole interface.

The full guide, with the rules for keys, contexts and plurals, is TRANSLATING.md. A wrong or awkward text in your language can be reported with the Translation form.

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