Merlin is delivered in 3 localizations: English, German and French and is compatible with the Mac OS X system preferences. This means, is your Finder running in French it will also run in French. Is your Finder running in Dutch and German is listed after it but before English, it will run in German.

To change the preferred system language in French for example, just call the ‘System Preferences’ and the ‘Language & Text’ pane.

Switch to the ‘Language’ tab. Select the language you want to have as your standard language, drag&drop it before the top most entry.

If you now start Merlin, you will see it run in French. Your Finder is by the way not yet French, but it will be the next time you restart it.

We sometimes get asked, how to define the language of Merlin in English when having a French system.

The answer is… it depends on your Mac OS X version.

On Mac OS X 10.5.x for example, you may disable the German and French localizations of the Merlin application in its Finder information dialog.

On Mac OX 10.6.x, where there is no such area anymore in the Finder information, you could use a small AppleScript we’ve wrote.

Are you curious what it does? And how it’s doing it?

It writes in the terminal a command setting the default language of the application. When you call it and select English for example, it writes:

defaults write net.projectwizards.Merlin2 AppleLanguages -array 'en'

Should you prefer using the terminal and would like to define another alternative  language then the one defined by the Mac OS X preferences (German for example), this is what to write when setting the language to French:

defaults write net.projectwizards.Merlin2 AppleLanguages -array 'fr' 'de'