It’s easy, sitting here in the middle of one of the world’s largest English-speaking countries, to assume that mind mapping software in English works for everyone. But the fact is it doesn’t. One look at the results of my Twitter searches for the terms “mindmap” and “mind map” confirm that there are large numbers of people around the world working with mind maps who don’t speak English.
That’s why I recently scanned the websites of the major mind mapping software developers, to see which languages their programs support. The results of my informal research can be found in the mind map above right. The results are color coded by country; please click on the image to view a larger version.
I developed this list by perusing the websites and support forums of the software developers. If I missed anyone, I apologize – it simply means that your mention of these capabilities wasn’t immediately obvious. Please feel welcome to post your additions and corrections to the comments area below.
One thing that surprised me was the large number of programs that don’t appear to support languages other than English. I think they’re doing themselves and their potential customers a major disservice. But I also understand the enormous time and expense that must be involved in rewriting thousand of lines of code just to support other languages and character sets, with no guarantee that this investment will pay off.
If you look at the mind map of language localizations, one of the first things you’ll notice is that FreeMind, the open-source mind mapping program, supports an enormous number of languages. This is accomplished by downloading a separate resource file, which you must copy and paste into the same directory into which you install FreeMind. Not terribly hard for intermediate or advanced computer users, but probably more than a beginner would want to mess with.
Still, it’s a clever way to address this challenge – don’t create dozens of localized versions of your program, each with a slightly different code base. Rather, publish one program, and then supply configuration files that load the proper character sets and translate the program’s toolbars into the language desired.
Emily Van Keogh · 750 weeks ago
We include as standard the following languages within the iMindMap tool: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Dutch, Polish, Traditional Chinese, Chinese Simplified, Thai, Swedish, Danish, Welsh and Portuguese (Brazilian).
Thanks!
Emily
Marcos Alves · 750 weeks ago
Bagheera · 732 weeks ago
Agam · 750 weeks ago
Habib · 587 weeks ago
thanks for making this good while important point.
For a right-to-left user, fact interface could be in English (or any latin language). what's important is being able to write from right to left, and in most cases, a mix of two languages in different positions of a mindmap like what one can do in Word or PowerPoint environment.
Philippe Boukobza · 750 weeks ago
Thank you for this very useful post, we can add Spanish as a User Interface language available for XMind.
Philippe
spicynodes 2p · 750 weeks ago
stephen · 749 weeks ago
XMind also supports Spanish :) http://www.xmind.net/downloads/
Paul Telling · 747 weeks ago
Paul Telling
Graphic Recorder
Creative Communications Creator http://www.paultelling.com.au
Wayne Chan · 744 weeks ago
I would like to add Mindjet MindManager to this mix of mapping tools that supports multiple languages. MindManager currently supports: English, German, French, and Japanese.
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