Changing the Language Preference in GIMP When You Can't Read the Language it Started Out in. WITH PICTURES!

Gemma, you're just having an awful week darling. I do hope this helps!


First off Open your GIMP. Yours is NOT going to look like mine as I've tweaked my User Preferences pretty heavily. But the Menus should be in the same place and that's what matters.

Of course, it should still look something similar to this.

This is currently in English to help you see what's going on and understand. I will be reverse engineering my GIMP to Belorussian for this tutorial. (I picked randomly from the languages list.)

So once you've got it open the first menu you will hit will be the second one from the left. This is your Edit Menu.

This menu is divided into 4 sections. The First Option of the fourth section is the Preferences option. It will have a little screwdriver and hammer crossed icon to the left. It's a little pastel in color and looks like it might be greyed out, but it's not.

This is the box you should see now (Ignore the screen cap in the back there. lol. Oops.) It is going to come up on an Environment Panel. We want the second option on the list on the left side of this window.

So you click on that second option and the right panel will change to something similar to this. The first drop down menu is your Language Preferences. Go ahead and click on the arrow on the right to drop the menu down.

Now, I could get my lovely Thai next door neighbor to go ahead and type in what English would look like in Thai for me, but that would be moot I'm afraid. And I don't like to bother Chen too much. She's such a wonderful neighbor. But what are you looking for then? You are looking for this in particular " [en_GB] " It will appear just like that without the quotations select this option and then click OK and promise me you're going to keep reading and Not Panic! DON'T PANIC! REALLY!!! I know that nothing will happen. After clicking OK, you have to close GIMP and reopen it to see the language change.

Like so. Look at the red boxes above and you can see that my language has been changed to Belorussian. Following the same steps above got me right back to where I started.

And OMG. Gemma! You have my pity darling. Looking at my GIMP without my familiar language was really frustrating even if I knew where to go. I hope this helps at least.  KISSES!