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NOTE: TinyMCE 5 reached End of Support in April 2023. No more bug fixes, security updates, or new features will be introduced to TinyMCE 5. We recommend you upgrade to TinyMCE 6 or consider TinyMCE 5 Long Term Support (LTS) if you need more time.

Localize TinyMCE

Localize TinyMCE with global language capabilities.

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TinyMCE makes your project accessible to the world through its simple localization framework.

This section demonstrates how to change TinyMCE’s user interface to the user’s language preference. These settings change the language in the toolbar, menu items, buttons, and tooltips.

Note: Language settings can be controlled in these configuration options: directionality, language and language_url. There is also a Directionality plugin that adds a toolbar button to control ltr-rtl behavior.

Step 1

Go to the language download page to review a list of language packs available for TinyMCE.

Click the download link on the far right of the table for a single language. Check the box beside each language and then click the download button at the bottom of the table for multiple languages.

Important: The TinyMCE community translation project provides the language packs on our language download page.

Step 2

Unpack the language js file(s) into the path/to/tinymce/langs/ folder.

Important: The language settings will not work unless the language pack is placed in langs/ directory. The language_url configuration option is another method to enable additional language settings.

Step 3

Set the language option in TinyMCE’s configuration to the language code in the list on this page.

Step 4

Load TinyMCE to confirm that the language is set correctly.

A working example

The following code snippet sets TinyMCE’s language to Chinese and the text directionality from right to left.

Download the Chinese language pack to test this functionality. Install a local instance of TinyMCE from the downloads page. Follow the self-hosted install instructions.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <script src="js/tinymce.min.js"></script>
  <script type="text/javascript">
  tinymce.init({
    selector: 'textarea',
    language: 'zh_CN',
    directionality: 'rtl'
  });
  </script>
</head>

<body>
  <form method="post">
    <textarea>你好,世界!</textarea>
  </form>
</body>
</html>

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Except as otherwise noted, the content of this page is licensed under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License, and code samples are licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.