How do I change the language of the 25 word mnemonic seed in the GUI or CLI?

Question

How can I change the wallet variant (language) of the monero GUI wallet? The real question behind this is that I have a seed in a different language than English. I will have a problem if I want to use that seed in future to restore in a different wallet which might only support English. As a consequence I would like to change my wallet language to English before using it.

Answer 1

The GUI languages work as follows. On the first page of the wizard you can select a language. If that particular language also has a corresponding mnemonic seed word list, your mnemonic seed will be in the same language when you create a new wallet. Thus, you'll get a 25 word mnemonic seed in your local language. Conversely, if it doesn't have a corresponding mnemonic seed word list, your mnemonic seed will be in English when you create a new wallet. Thus, you'll get an English 25 word mnemonic seed.

The code for this described behavior can be found here. As you can see from the code, the list of available languages for the mnemonic seed is:

<!--
List of available languages for your wallet's seed:
0 : Deutsch         (German)
1 : English
2 : Español         (Spanish)
3 : Français        (French)
4 : Italiano        (Italian)
5 : Nederlands      (Dutch)
6 : Português       (Portuguese)
7 : русский язык    (Russian)
8 : 日本語          (Japanese)
9 : 简体中文 (中国) (Simplified Chinese (Mainland))
-->

Thus, as can be seen from this list, if you select Deutsch as language, it will also give you a corresponding Deutsch (German) 25 word mnemonic seed. The code for this behavior is as follows:

<language display_name="Deutsch" locale="de_DE" wallet_language="Deutsch" flag="/lang/flags/german.png" qs="none"/>`

To clarify, wallet_language determines the language of the 25 word mnemonic seed, which is Deutsch in this example.

Now if you, for instance, select Swedish as language, it'll give you an English 25 word mnemonic seed, because it doesn't have a corresponding Swedish mnemonic seed word list. The code for this behavior is as follows:

<language display_name="Swedish" locale="sv_SE" wallet_language="English" flag="/lang/flags/sweden.png" qs="none"/>

As you can see, the wallet_language is now English.

---

As a consequence I would like to change my wallet language to English before using it.

Now, unfortunately, closing an existing wallet, selecting a new language (in your case English) on the first page of the wizard and lastly reopening this particular wallet (using the Open a wallet from file option on the second page of the wizard) will not change the language of the 25 word mnemonic seed. Therefore, we have to use the CLI as workaround. This is done as follows:

1. Exit the GUI and make sure to stop the daemon as well.

2. Browse to the directory your wallet files are located (Documents\Monero\<wallet-name> on Windows | ~/Monero/<wallet-name> on Linux and Mac OS X).

3. Copy <wallet-name>.keys to the same directory as monero-wallet-cli. On Linux and Windows, monero-wallet-cli will be in the same directory as monero-wallet-gui. By contrast, on Mac OS X, monero-wallet-cli will be in ~/Applications/monero-wallet-gui.app/Contents/MacOS

4. In the directory your wallet files are located, rename <wallet-name>.keys to <wallet-name>-backup.keys

5. You should now have <wallet-name>-backup.keys in the directory your wallet files are located and <wallet-name>.keys in the same directory as monero-wallet-cli

6. Open monero-wallet-cli by double clicking on it (Windows and Mac OS X) or with ./monero-wallet-cli from the terminal (Linux)

7. Enter your wallet name and password. The wallet doesn't have to be connected to a daemon to change the mnemonic seed language.

8. Now type set seed language

9. This will show you a list of available seed languages and their corresponding numbers. For example, English is 1

10. Enter the number of your preferred seed language and hit enter.

11. Type exit

12. Copy <wallet-name>.keys back to the directory your wallet files are located.

13. You should now have both <wallet-name>-backup.keys and <wallet-name>.keys. Note that the former still contains your old mnemonic seed language (kind of as backup), whereas the latter contains your new mnemonic seed language.

14. Restart the GUI. You should now have your "old" wallet with a new mnemonic seed language.

15. On the Settings page, press Show seed & keys to verify the mnemonic seed language.

---

Lastly, if you want to change the mnemonic seed language of your CLI wallet, simply start from step 6.