Since about 2000, the IDE has been mostly localized into a variety of languages including German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese. I say “mostly” localized because property names that appear in the Inspector, for example, have never been localized as this would create confusion when you go to use them in your code. However, a mostly but not completely localized product is not very helpful especially when the documentation itself is not localized.
Including the Quickstarts, Tutorials, the four User’s Guide books and the Language Reference, Xojo currently has over 3000 pages of documentation. While it would be great to have all of this localized into six or more languages, it’s not realistic. The User’s Guide books and the Language Reference are updated frequently and keeping them localized over time would be a significant challenge. Realistically, to be successful with Xojo the user must have a degree of comfort reading English.
With that in mind, we have decided to no longer localize the Xojo IDE into any of the European languages. QuickStarts and Tutorials will continue to be localized because they help the user get started. We’ll continue to offer native language support through the Xojo Forum, via email, as well as on Twitter in French (@xojoFR), Italian (@xojoIT), Japanese (@xojoJP), German (@xojoDeutsch), Portuguese (@xojoPT), and Spanish (@xojoES). The IDE will continue to be localized into Japanese and Chinese because users in those countries are far less likely to be able to read English. This will save us time and resources since we will only be providing a single build of the IDE rather than english-only and a multi-lingual builds.
We know that some of you prefer a localized IDE, and if it were feasible to provide all of the documentation in each of the languages we support, we would do so. But know that this change will free up some time that can be better used to provide an overall better product.