While it’s easy to change the language of Capture One in Windows, it’s not that straightforward in MacOS: there’s no option in the Preferences to do so. However, we can still do it using the command line in MacOS’ Terminal app.
Launch Terminal
The Terminal app is what we’ll use to enter commands to modify the system preferences of Capture One. We’ll use the defaults command, a MacOS standard and safe one that is widely used to set many different preferences.
Press and hold ⌘ and press the space bar to launch Spotlight. There, type “Terminal”. Press Enter to open it. Note that it’s likely that your prompt will differ from mine, I’m using Oh My Zsh which spices up the command line.
Change the language
By default, C1P will use the system language. In my case, that’s Spanish. We’re going to switch it to English and then French to test it. Here’s a video that goes through the entire process.
As you can see, once in the Terminal, typing the following and pressing Enter will change the language from the system default to English:
defaults write com.phaseone.captureone12 AppleLanguages '(en)'If you restart C1P (or launch if it was closed), you’ll see the interface language changed. If you want to change it to some other language like French, type instead
defaults write com.phaseone.captureone12 AppleLanguages '(fr)'Press Enter, restart C1P again and the interface will be in French. One more thing to note is the domain
com.phaseone.captureone12This is because I’m using Capture One Pro 12. If you’re using a previous version like 10 or 11, change the number accordingly.
Language codes
So how does the languages work? You surely noticed that only the characters enclosed in parentheses changed when switching the language from English to French. These are called language codes and the most common can be found in this page:
www.gnu.org/software/gettext/manual/html_chapter/gettext_16.html#Language-Codes
Restoring to system language
Finally, if for some reason you need to restore the language of C1P to the system’s, you can use this command:
defaults delete com.phaseone.captureone12 AppleLanguages
Thank you, very useful!
Thank you!!! Works great even on C1P 13 😉
Awesome! Glad it was helpful to you and thanks for confirming that this still works to change the language of Capture One 20!
Please, help me. I can’t change language in capture one 20. Should I write “defaults write com.phaseone.captureone13 AppleLanguages ‘(en)’ ” ?
Yes! You have to write that. You can verify it’s the language by doing
defaults read com.phaseone.captureone13 | vim -That will launch the defaults file in vim, a text editing utility for the command line. You’ll find there the AppleLanguages entry and the languages.