How to choose a different language

I have used Opera for years, and love the mail client. I've just bought a new computer
and as I live in Japan it came with a Japanese OS (Windows 7 64-bit home premium).

My previous computer, which ran VISTA Absolute, was bought from a friend who was
moving away from Japan, and although it was a Japanese OS, I could access help and
most other things in English. Opera, for instance, ran in English.

I have just downloaded Opera to my new computer, but everything is in Japanese. I
can read and understand it but I would prefer it to be in English, particularly the help
files. How can I get Opera to run in English?

And I note that the Link and Sync function, which I hoped would import my mail address
list, has only imported my bookmarks and Speed Dial pages. Can I somehow get it to
do the whole job? It also hasn't imported my mail archive, and I REALLY need that!

Thanks,

Roger

Menu > Settings > Preferences > General. Click on details (on the bottom) ghen on "choose" and find the lng file of the language that you want.

In this case it should be en.lng

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

And I note that the Link and Sync function, which I hoped would import my mail addresslist, has only imported my bookmarks and Speed Dial pages. Can I somehow get it todo the whole job?

Opera link does not syncs contact lists, e-mails or anything related. You'll need to copy the old mail folder to the new Opera profile if it is the case.

And for contacts, just copy contacts.adr. Or import it.

Thank you. At the moment I am having trouble getting the new computer to "see" the old one on the home LAN, but once I have that handled I will try transferring the file, When you say "copy the old mail folder" do you mean the entire folder? If so, what is the name of that folder (so I can be sure I transfer the right folder)? If you mean a single file, then please tell me the name of that file. Thanks again.

Originally posted by LeoCG:

Menu > Settings > Preferences > General. Click on details (on the bottom) ghen on "choose" and find the lng file of the language that you want.

In this case it should be en.lng

Thanks. But as everything is in Japanese, and the names of pulldowns and functions are not necessarily direct translations of the terms in English, I have been unable to find these settings.

Can you please identify WHICH menu, and where it is on the screen, and when you say "the bottom" what do you mean? The last item at the bottom of the pulldown? Or something at the bottom of a Page? I just can't find these settings.

I did find some choices that had two "en" files, one of them "en.lng" but these were already selected and did not need to be added (and are ineffective where they are if these are the files that are supposed to control Opera's working language(.

Might it not be better to visit the Opera site again after uninstalling my present version, and download all over again? On previous occasions I have been given a choice of which version I want (and I remember that the Japanese version was often slightly behind the English version in coming out of beta.

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

When you say "copy the old mail folder" do you mean the entire folder? If so, what is the name of that folder (so I can be sure I transfer the right folder)?

Yep, the entire mail folder. See help> about to find the path to it.

Note that you should only to this if you had not set any accounts on the new install.

Try change the language on opera:config#UserPrefs|LanguageFile

Or Ctrl+F12 > First tab > Button on the bottom > First button from the top.

Originally posted by LeoCG:

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

When you say "copy the old mail folder" do you mean the entire folder? If so, what is the name of that folder (so I can be sure I transfer the right folder)?

Yep, the entire mail folder. See help> about to find the path to it.

Note that you should only to this if you had not set any accounts on the new install.

Well I have just started (second day) using my usual mail account on the new computer. Should I delete it before attempting what you suggest?

Thanks for the feedback. Most grateful! I would really really hate to lose the functionality of Opera's superb mail client!

Roger

Originally posted by LeoCG:

Try change the language on opera:config#UserPrefs|LanguageFile

Or Ctrl+F12 > First tab > Button on the bottom > First button from the top.

Got a "did not find" when clicking on the link you provided. CTRL +F12 takes me to a Windows panel for selecting printer options. There are no tabs and nothing anywhere at all like what you describe.

It looks as if the Japanese Opera is so different from what you are looking at that your attempts to help are being frustrated.

Can you make any other suggestions?

Thanks for trying,

Roger

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

Got a "did not find" when clicking on the link you provided.

Type opera:config in the address field and press ENTER. Then, look under the "User Prefs" section for "Language File".

The reason the link didn't work is because of a bug in the forums. Try opera:config#Language%20File instead and point it to en.lng.

What address field? Where? When I have found "Language FIle" what do I do?

I really don't have a clue about all this stuff, but I am not stupid and if told
what to do can usually work it out.

Don't give up on me yet!

Please,

Roger

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

What address field?

The address field is the text input box on the address bar where you type www.google.com and press ENTER etc. to goto a site. But, if you just click the link I provided, it'll take you to where you need to go.

On that page, you need to click "choose" and browse to en.lng, left-click it to select it and choose open. Then, on the opera:config page, you need to click save. Then, restart Opera if necessary.

The location of en.lng should be at:

Computer -> C:\Program Files (x86)\Opera\locale\en\en.lng

Well, I finally made it. Opera now has English menus and pulldowns, etc. The only place where Japanese persists is in the "Labels" for posts that I am archiving. These have persisted but everything else is in English. Now to try the same trick on my Windows 7 Home Premium computer. Supposed to be limited to the more expensive "Ultimate" or "Professional" editions. We shall see. Thanks for the help. You finally pitched it low enough for me to be able to grasp it!

Roger

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

Well I have just started (second day) using my usual mail account on the new computer. Should I delete it before attempting what you suggest?

You can export your mail on the old one and import on the new one.

Originally posted by LeoCG:

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

Well I have just started (second day) using my usual mail account on the new computer. Should I delete it before attempting what you suggest?

You can export your mail on the old one and import on the new one.

Will the export handle my complete database of past mails and my large list of addresses? I can't find detailed descriptions of exactly what "export" does. It seems to be more for switching to a different mail client but I'd be delighted to learn that it can do what I need!

Roger

Your contacts is on file contacts.adr, just copy the old one to new opera profile. Or use Menu > Settings > Import and Export > Import Opera contacts. Point it to the old contacts.adr.

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

Will the export handle my complete database of past mails

It should do it. But it will not export/import your settings, just the messages.

Btw, do you use pop or imap? Id it is imap, just (re)create the account and Opera will fetch all your (old) messages.

Originally posted by rogerdwilliams:

what "export" does. It seems to be more for switching to a different mail client

Yeh, that's mostly what exporting does. See <http://my.opera.com/operawiki/forums/topic.dml?id=1132992> and <http://my.opera.com/operawiki/forums/topic.dml?id=1132442> for how to backup/transfer/copy mail stuff or all of Opera's profile files.

Well, I seem to have REALLY screwed myself over the transfer of my Email database from the old computer to the new computer. Here's what happened. If you read through to the end of what may be a longish post and can hold out any hope for recovery, I'd be grateful to hear from you.

My new computer bought in Japan came with WIndows 7 Home Premium 64 bit OS, Japanese only. When I downloaded Opera, it came up in Japanese. Later, however, I discovered a non-Microsoft program that allows additional language modules to be installed on Home Premium OS's just as they can be on Professional or Ultimate OS's (this is normally impossible), so I installed the English module. The installation went well, and Opera, including the mail client, reverted to English EXCEPT (for some reason) for the titles of the Labels and the Sent and Received folders, which all remained in Japanese ("kichou" for valuable, "jushinbako" for Received folder, etc.).

Following advice to try Sync, I sync'ed Opera on the two computers, and was delighted to find that the complete list of mail contacts and all my Speed Dial pages from the old computer were transferred to the new one.

The bad news is that somehow, in the process, all the posts saved in my old computer's database with English labels have disappeared. And now even the labels have disappeared! I suspect this may be due to the strange names for the labels that persisted in the new computer. My only hope is that as the new computer's Opera IMAP settings are "leave mail on server" all the data still exists on the old computer, although before the labels completely disappeared I was seeing NO "valuable" or "important" mails, which is where I stored registration codes for software, receipts for purchases, and lots of other stuff both important and valuable. There's be endless problems if I can't recover those mails!

Any suggestions, anyone?

As a precaution I am not allowing Opera to do any database tidying up in case it would further screw things.

Roger

You can't export/import labels settings afaik, you'll need to configure them again. But you can export (and then import) the messages in the labels.

Just right click on a label > Export. Then on the other install, Menu > Settings > Import and Export > Import Mail > Import generic mbox file. Pick the file to where the messages were exported.

Btw, if you had not set your labels to "hide message from other views" then you just need to search for the messages because they will be on All messages > Received.

I decided to put my computer back into the original out-of-the-box state and reinstall everything.

It's now an English-language computer. I have installed Opera but NOT opened a mail account using
the browser mail client.

In my old computer, whose drives I can access over the home LAN, is a version of Opera with all
my mail until a few days ago on it. How EXACTLY do I go about setting up a mirror image of this
setup on my new computer?

The omailbase.dat file is about 15MB, but only mails for the recent past are showing on my old
computer. I'm hoping that this file contains most of the older stuff, and that I can somehow get
access to that on the new computer.

If this kind of thing is described anywhere in detail, a reference to that would do just fine. If you
really know this stuff and can give specific help, I will be extremely grateful. "Try this, it night
work" is not enough help to someone as ignorant as I am.

TIA

Roger