One of our goals is for cPanel & WHM to be a great experience for users worldwide. To achieve this goal we need to make some significant changes.


First, a little background.

Right now, cPanel & WHM has two localization systems available: One that stems from cPanel 10 (and maybe older?), and one that was introduced in cPanel 11.25. The older system is often called the LANG system and has many constraints, such as being based heavily upon the English language. The new one is called Maketext and is far more flexible and feature rich. Having two systems makes things a bit complicated, to say the least.

We are removing our dependency on, and use of, the older LANG system. What does this mean for you?

  1. In cPanel & WHM version 11.46, both X3 and Paper Lantern will be fully translatable, using a single system.
  2. Quality of translations will improve dramatically. The older system often created partial sentences which caused a lot of problems with translations.
  3. The older LANG system will still be available for use by third parties.
  4. Any existing custom translation that relied upon the LANG system will no longer work with stock X3 in cPanel & WHM version 11.46.

Item number four will understandably be of concern to anyone who has provided their own translation of the cPanel interface. We are working to provide tools and information that will help you update your translation. More information will be available on this soon.

Removing use of the LANG system means the translations we provide will also no longer function. All of the current translations will be updated. We are also expanding the list of supported languages to a total of 29:

  • Arabic
  • Chinese (Simplified)
  • Chinese (Traditional)
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch (Netherlands)
  • Filipino
  • Finnish
  • French (France)
  • German (Germany)
  • Greek
  • Hebrew
  • Hungarian
  • Indonesian
  • Italian (Italy)
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Malay (Malaysia)
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Spanish (Spain)
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Vietnamese

Before closing, I’d like to clarify item number three: The older LANG system will still be available for use by third parties. If you have a custom theme, a fork of X3, or an application that uses the older LANG system, they will continue to function in cPanel & WHM 11.46. cPanel & WHM itself will not use any of the language files to display text in the interfaces that we provide.

The long-term plan is to remove support for the older system. We strongly encourage everyone to move to the latest Maketext system now. A starting point for using the new system is to become more familiar with related documentation.

Language improvements have been a long time coming. We are very excited to be bringing these to you. To stay informed, continue following the cPanel Blog as well as the “As a non-English user I want my language to have the same level of coverage of cPanel & WHM as English so I can have the best experience possible using the language I am most familiar with” feature request.