[Feature Rquest] Please add an option to choose Signal Desktop UI language from within the app

[bungabunga]

• I have searched open and closed issues for duplicates

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Bug description

I don't like to spam the issues section with feature requests but since this feature is already present in Signal Android and I also think it's a useful one I gave it a try. People are using their systems differently and not all have their native language set as a system language. My reason behind this is that I like to tweak my system a lot so I have to do a lot of googling where slovenan translations don't help much. But as a Signal Desktop user I want to have it's UI in my language, because of auto spell checking and also to see the changes in translations (as a Signal Desktop translator). I think others would also find this feature useful.

Steps to reproduce

If you have a need to change Signal Desktop UI language from system's (English in my case) to your own there's curently no way to do that from within the app.

Actual result: Curently it's only possible to change language in Signal Desktop if you change the system language.
Expected result: It should be possible to change the Signal Desktop UI language from within the app.

Platform info

Operating System: Ubuntu 17.10
Browser: Firefox 57 (default, also Chrome, Brave, Opera)

Signal version: 1.0.33

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

If you're on linux, you can easily change environment variables before starting up to use Signal Desktop in a different language than your system language.

[Mr-Pepe]

That is not an answer a regular user can work with. Is there a roadmap for this feature? Is a technical issue preventing its implementation or is it a matter of available workforce?

[scottnonnenberg-signal]

@Mr-Pepe Just about everything is about available workforce. We're hiring! https://signal.org/workworkwork/

[stefanb]

MacOS as of Catalina only supports 39 languages, whereas there are 54 locales in this github repository, meaning that at least 15 translations cannot be used on MacOS. Even more if there is any mismatch in supported locales.

OS language is a sane default language for an app, but users should be able to pick their own language within an app, specially if such translations exist.

EDIT: Actually MacOS allows setting any per-app language in the system preferences, so i was able to use the Signal app in the non-OS language. This is not intuitive, so there could at least be a note in the Signal settings, or even better: a link/button taking user to the OS "Language & Region" settings.

[ctrlwitt]

It's 2020 and I still can't change Signal desktop language.

[ism]

Any update on that?

[szepeviktor]

Please share where the Desktop app gets the language on Windows.
Maybe we can hack our way around it.

[defkev]

Since Signal desktop is using Electron which is using Chromium's l10n_util start Signal using:

./Signal.exe --lang=en-US

Check %localappdata%\Programs\signal-desktop\locales for supported locales.

But frankly this is absolutely ridiculous to not provide a simple way to set the preferred language, this is on par with Google using the users geographic location for the locale like people don't speak more than one language or travel, completely bonkers.

Considering that feature request has been open for three years doesn't help either.

Silly!

[RichardPasmans]

Since Signal desktop is using Electron which is using Chromium's l10n_util start Signal using:

./Signal.exe --lang=en-US

Check %localappdata%\Programs\signal-desktop\locales for supported locales.

Comfirm that this works. With this parameter you can override the language of the operating system.
For the dutch language it would be:

Signal.exe --lang=nl

[tiagoc]

Bumping this.
I can also confirm putting "--lang=en-US" at the end of the shortcut destination on Windows works to always start it up on another language. But this should really be configurable.

[Danapit]

Changing language settings (as well as spellcheck language) in Win desktop version would be a much welcome feature! But the workaround by defkev worked like charm, many thanks.

[DidierLoiseau]

On Linux it didn't work for me with --lang, however I could get the the French spellchecking with

LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8 signal-desktop

Strangely, this does not change the interface language. You have to set the LANGUAGE variable for that:

LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=fr_BE signal-desktop

So I modified the launcher:

/usr/share/applications/signal-desktop.desktop

and included the variables in the command line:

Exec=env LANG=fr_BE.UTF-8 LANGUAGE=fr_BE /opt/Signal/signal-desktop --no-sandbox %U

edit: in the end I actually copied the file to ~/.local/share/applications because every update was resetting the system file (I was hoping it wouldn’t be the case if the file had no change in the update, or that Ubuntu would warn me about a conflict).

[aniston]

@Mr-Pepe Just about everything is about available workforce. We're hiring! https://signal.org/workworkwork/

@scottnonnenberg , why point to a "hiring" link to a user @Mr-Pepe who was indicating a regular user's problem ?

• there are many ways of getting things done, thanks @defkev for the neat jugaad trick to get the interface in the language needed without touching the system language or reinventing the wheel.

[DidierLoiseau]

Cross-linking this feature request on the community forums: https://community.signalusers.org/t/allow-setting-os-independent-language-during-installation-or-in-preferences/5978 ➡️ go vote there 🙂

(thanks @Meteor0id for creating it)

[Eagle3386]

How to vote there when there's no real voting feature & voting for features isn't respected by the developers?

Besides, I don't even get the benefit of breaking the "typical developer's dream of 1 single ALM system to handle all developer related tasks" by using GitHub for dev-stuff only & forcing users to use an (quite awful regarding UX, to be honest) community website somewhere else.

[DidierLoiseau]

Well I noticed there is a like button there but then I have no idea how the devs can use this information TBH.

And I don’t know either how they can manage feature requests properly like that, but this one is closed so we don’t have much choice.