Languages and localization

The Localization settings allow you to set global defaults for your Metabase instance. You can find Localization under Admin settings > Settings.

Default language

Here you can set the default language (also called the “instance language”) across your Metabase UI, system emails, dashboard subscriptions, and alerts. People can pick a different language from their own account settings.

Supported languages

Thanks to our amazing user community, Metabase has been translated into many different languages. Due to the way we collect translations, languages may be added or removed during major releases depending on translation coverage.

The languages you can currently pick from are:

• English (default)
• Albanian
• Arabic
• Bulgarian
• Catalan
• Chinese (simplified)
• Chinese (traditional)
• Czech
• Dutch
• Farsi/Persian
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Latvian
• Norwegian Bokmål
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Serbian
• Slovak
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

While Metabase can support languages that read right to left, the Metabase UI is designed around languages that read left to right.

Translations

Our community contributes to Metabase translations on our POEditor project. If you’d like to help make Metabase available in a language you’re fluent in, we’d love your help!

For a new language to be added to Metabase, it must reach 100%. Once it does, we add it in the next major or minor release of Metabase. All existing languages in Metabase must stay at 100% to continue being included in the next major version of Metabase. This rule ensures that no one encounters a confusing mishmash of English and another language when using Metabase.

We understand that this is a high bar, so we commit to making sure that before each major release, any additions or changes to text in the product are completed at least 10 calendar days before the release ships, at which point we notify all translators that a new release will be happening soon.

Note that while we only remove languages in major releases, we are happy to add them back for minor releases, so it’s always a good time to jump in and start translating.

Report timezone

Use report timezone to set a default display time zone for dates and times in Metabase. The report timezone setting is a display setting only, so changing the report timezone won’t affect the time zone of any data in your database.

Report timezone doesn’t apply to timestamp without time zone data types, including the output of convertTimezone expressions. For example:

Report timezone is only supported for the following databases:

• BigQuery
• Druid
• MySQL
• Oracle
• PostgreSQL
• Presto
• Redshift
• Vertica

First day of the week

If you need to, you can change the first day of the week for your instance (the default is Sunday). Setting the first day of the week affects things like grouping by week and filtering in questions built using the query builder. This setting doesn’t affect SQL queries.

Localization options

Localization options allow you to set global default display formats for dates, times, numbers, and currencies.

You can also override these localization options for specific fields or questions. For more info, see Formatting.

Dates and times

• Date style: the way dates should be displayed in tables, axis labels, and tooltips.
• Date separators: you can choose between slashes (2022/12/14), dashes (2022-12-14), and dots (2022.12.14.).
• Abbreviate names of days and months: whenever a date is displayed with the day of the week and/or the month written out, turning this setting on will display e.g. “January” as “Jan” or “Monday” as “Mon”.
• Time style: choose to display the time using either a 12 or 24-hour clock (e.g., 3:00 PM or 15:00).

Numbers

• Separator style: some people use commas to separate thousands places, and others use periods. Here’s where you can indicate which camp you belong to.

Currency

• Unit of currency: if you do most of your business in a particular currency, you can specify that here.
• Currency label style: whether you want to have your currencies labeled with a symbol, a code (like “USD”), or its full name.
• Where to display the unit of currency: this pertains specifically to tables, and lets you choose if you want the currency labels to appear only in the column heading, or next to each value in the column.