Unexpected change in language

Pat Mitchell

My note pad switched to a foreign language (I think Chinese) and I don’t know how this happened or how to fix it. When I try to load a document, it comes up foreign and unreadable. I am desperate for help.

Jonathan Johansen

@Pat-Mitchell have you tried following any of the advice here, or even using a phone app like Google Translate to try navigating the menus? Hopefully one of those get you out of trouble.

PeterJones

@Pat-Mitchell ,

Since this question had nothing to do with the installer issues from the original post that you replied to, I forked it out to a separate question: this will get it in the right place so people know you are looking for help on this separate issue.

There are two ways that I could interpret your question: your first phrase, “My note pad switched to a foreign language”, makes it seem like the user interface (menus, dialog boxes, etc) changed to a different language. For that, @Jonathan-Johansen’s advice is solid. As it says in that discussion, if you cannot figure out which menus to click to access the settings, because it’s too foreign for you, you can exit Notepad++, and use Windows Explorer to go to %AppData%\Notepad++\ (or appropriate config file location for your Notepad++) and delete nativeLang.xml – when you restart Notepad++, it will go back to the default English language.

But you also said, “When I try to load a document, it comes up foreign and unreadable” – and the Settings > Preferences > General > Localization (or deleting nativeLang.xml) can do nothing about that. Notepad++ shows you the text that’s in a file, regardless of what localization language your user-interface is set to. If the text is in Chinese characters, it doesn’t matter whether your user interface is set to English, Russian, or pig latin – the text will still show up as Chinese.

So if you are loading a file and it is showing up in valid Chinese – if you don’t know, you could copy the text, and paste it into your favorite online translator, and if it can spit out meaningful English when it translates, then it probably is valid) – but if it’s showing up as real Chinese, that means the file is really written in Chinese. So either you are not opening the same file as you did before (if you are sure that exact same file used to be in English), or someone edited that file and replaced its contents with the Chinese.
However, if the text copied from the file cannot be translated (even if you put the translator website into “automatically detect language”), then it’s probably a binary file. If so, you are either opening a different file, or someone zipped it or changed it to a different format (a .docx or .pdf are not text files, so Notepad++ cannot be used to read them); or maybe someone encrypted the textfile, in which case you will have to ask them how to decrypt it before you try to edit the text in Notepad++; or, unfortunately, if your machine has been infected with ransomware or some other malware, that malicious code (which has nothing to do with Notepad++) may have encrypted or destroyed your text files, maybe in the hopes that you would pay them to give you back your original files (never do that; clean things up and restore your data from your backup, if that’s the condition you are in).