How to change the language my photoshop extended

Question

Hi,
I wanted to change the languge of my product from french to english. How can i do it without uninstalling and reinstalling the product. please help.
alex

Answer 1

Before you do anything, make sure you exit Photoshop! Otherwise you may experience problems. The second step is to open the Photoshop program folder. On Windows, this is "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop " by default. If you installed the application with the Creative Suite or if you customized the installation path, this may vary, though.
If you are on a Macintosh (lucky you :), I think you somehow need to open the application Package to access the files. I don't know any details of how to do this, and I am not even sure this method works on a Mac, as I don't have access to one. I'm afraid you are on your own there. Feel free to post your results here.
Ok, now look into the "Required" subfolder. There you will find two files, one named "tw10428.dat", and one named "tw12508.dat". Depending on you Photoshop version, you may have only one of these. These files contain the localized text strings (i.e. the translations of the menu items and dialog boxes and all that stuff) for your Photoshop.
The trick is to rename these files, so Photoshop won't be able to access them. I advise you to append ".bak" (for backup) to the file name, so you can change back later if you want to. I would recommend against deleting them.
If you are on a Photoshop version without Activation, you are done now. Start Photoshop the way you usually do, and the interface should appear in vintage US English. If you are using newer version of Photoshop which has the the beloved Activation feature (the CS and CS2 versions if I remember correctly), you need to perform an additional step. If you skip this, Photoshop won't start because the activation wizard thinks it's being fooled.
In the main Photoshop application folder, go to the "Activation" subfolder. There you will find another subfolder named with your language acronym (eg. "de_DE" in the German version). Rename this folder to "en_US". Now you can start Photoshop, and the interface language has changed.
If you want to switch back to your native version, just rename the files and folder as the were before. If anything went wrong (I told you you are doing this at your own risk!), don't despair, a re-install of the application should fix your problems.
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