[B Gallagher]

I'm just wondering, how does one go about changing the language that OS X is in?

Reason being, I'm going to pick up a PowerBook in Japan later this year, and (at least on the apple.co.jp site) I only have a choice to get a Japanese OS. Although I can understand a fair bit of Japanese, I would still prefer to have something like an OS in English.

Would I need to reinstall OS X fresh in order to do this?

Thanks.

[Oisín]

No, you wouldn't.

System preferences -> International -> just drag your language of choice to the top, log out, and log back in, and you'll have OS X in that language for that user. One of the stronger points of OS X, if you ask me.

You can even make an extra user where you have everything in Japanese, if you want; then you can teach yourself all the technical terms and stuff, and be sure to get them right (I do this with English, just to be sure to get all the names of menus and options right without having to log out and back in).

Besides, even though OS X is pre-installed on new machines, don't you have to choose languages the first time you start up anyway? Or am I remembering this wrongly?

[Psychonaut]

Gosh, it's been only a couple months but I can't remember the pre-installed Tiger setup.
But anyways, I had ordered my PowerBook with a Western Spanish keyboard and OS, although I'm a native English speaker. All a choice like that can effect is the default first-boot language. After that, you could probably switch to Nepalese even. That only used to be a problem with OS 9 and earlier, which necesitated (re)installing a region-specific edition.

Hey, Oisín, haven't heard from you in a while, 洋鬼子.

[jay3ld]

they preinstall everything.

to my understanding is after everything installs it starts to go though the set up of the machine. this is what apple does then shuts it down and does a "ghost" of the harddrive over to to the other machines. Then once you start it will get all the system info such as administrator name and pw and such.

[OreoCookie]

You have endless choices of languages under OS X, including Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, … You can change it without reinstalling anything, provided, you have installed the respective languages.

[d.fine]

Originally Posted by Oisín

One of the stronger points of OS X, if you ask me.

Agreed, this was an absolute pain on my former Wintel box. It could not have been easier in OS X

[[email protected]]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

You have endless choices of languages under OS X,

It's great but not "endless." There are 15 system localizations covering W. Europe and Asia, but nothing yet for E. Europe, Russia, the Middle East, India, etc.

[OreoCookie]

iTunes is available in Russian (or will be). But you are correct, the OS itself is not yet available in those languages. Certainly strange that even smaller countries (Denmark ) have a localized version … 

[TETENAL]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

Certainly strange that even smaller countries (Denmark ) have a localized version … 

It's not the size of the country, it's the size of the market that determines which languages are worthwhile.