How to Change the Language in SOLIDWORKS

This article walks through the steps and options of changing the language from English to a language of your choice in SOLIDWORKS.

Spanning a customer base all across the globe, SOLIDWORKS is available for use in 14 languages, including English. Thus, it may be beneficial for some customers to have the option to use SOLIDWORKS in their desired language, other than English.

First, you want to be sure that you have downloaded and installed the language of your choice. You can check by navigating to <install_location>\SolidWorks\lang (the default location is C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\lang) to see if you have the folder with the desired language besides the “english” folder.

If the folder is missing, you can download and install it by navigating to your machine’s Control Panel > Programs > Programs and Features, right-clicking on SOLIDWORKS 20XX, and selecting “Change”. This will open the SOLIDWORKS installation manager. From there, continue with “Modify Individual Installation” and proceed until you come across the Product Selection Page. Select the desired language and finalize the installation manager, by clicking "Modify," to download and install the language. A folder of said language should now appear in <install_location>\SolidWorks\lang. 

You can change the language from English to the language of your choice by navigating to Tools > Options > System Options > General, and clear checkboxes for “Use English language menus” and “Use English language features and file names.” These check boxes will be available if you have a selected language other than English during your installation and if SOLIDWORKS' system options are set to said language.

However, users may experience the system options being grayed out if the user account on their machine is set to English. Thus, SOLIDWORKS will continue operating in English no matter what language was selected in the installation. There are two ways to work around this scenario after having made sure that the desired language has been downloaded:

1. Change the system language to desired language via the Control Panel > Regional and Languages Settings, and make sure that the settings “Use English language menus” and “Use English language feature and file names” in SOLIDWORKS are unchecked.
   
   
2. If you do not want to change the system language but only the program’s language, change the folder name that is linked to the English language folder.
   
   
   1. Close out all SOLIDWORKS applications.
   2. Navigate to <install_location>\SolidWorks\lang (the default location is C:\Program Files\SolidWorks Corp\SolidWorks\lang) where the folders of English and the language of your choice should be located.
   3. Rename “english” to “english-backup” and rename the folder of the desired language to “english”.
      
      
      
      
      
   4. Relaunch SOLIDWORKS to view and operate the software in the language of your choice.