Languages

Scriptorium has four separate language settings, and they do not cover the same languages. This page is the honest list of what each one supports.

The important thing to know up front: the language of the app is not the language of your book. Scriptorium’s interface can be in German while you write in Japanese, and nothing about that combination is unusual or unsupported. The settings are deliberately independent.

The four settings

Setting	What it changes	Where you set it
Interface language	Menus, buttons, messages	Settings → General
Project language	Word counting, search, sorting, text direction, fonts	Project settings
Grammar language	What the grammar checker reads	Project settings
Dictation / read-aloud	The speech models	Project settings

Support matrix

“Interface” means the app has been translated into that language. The other three columns depend on third-party engines that ship with Scriptorium, and none of them were written by us.

Language	Interface	Grammar	Dictation	Read-aloud
English	✅	✅	✅	✅
Spanish	✅	✅	✅	✅
Portuguese (Brazil)	✅	✅	✅	✅
German	✅	✅	✅	✅
French	✅	✅	✅	✅
Italian	✅	✅	✅	✅
Dutch	✅	✅	✅	—
Polish	✅	✅	✅	—
Japanese	✅	—	—	✅
Chinese (Simplified)	✅	—	—	✅
Hindi	✅	—	—	✅
Korean	✅	—	—	—
Turkish	✅	—	—	—

A dash means the feature is not available in that language and Scriptorium will say so rather than guess. The grammar checker stays silent; dictation and read-aloud do not offer the language.

Translating the interface into a language does not add grammar, dictation or read-aloud for it. Those come from separate models, each with its own list, and we cannot extend them by translating our own text. This is the single most common wrong assumption about this feature, which is why this page exists.

Writing in a language that is not in the table

You can. The project language list is longer than the interface list — it includes Chinese (Traditional), Korean, Arabic, Hebrew, Bengali, Tamil and others — and setting it correctly still improves word counting, sentence detection, search, sorting and font choice even where no grammar check is available.

Four languages are deliberately not offered as project languages: Thai, Khmer, Lao and Burmese. They are written without spaces, so neither word counting nor character counting says anything true about them, and search would behave badly. We would rather leave them out than offer something that quietly gives wrong numbers.

Right-to-left languages

The interface is left-to-right only. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu are not among the interface languages, and the app’s layout does not mirror.

Your prose is a different matter: Arabic and Hebrew are supported project languages, right-to-left paragraphs display and edit correctly, and exports carry the text direction through. So you can write a right-to-left book in a left-to-right app — you cannot yet read the app’s own menus in one.

The promotional video

The video on the website is in English on every language version of the site. It contains recordings of the app itself, so translating it would mean re-recording every screen in every language rather than re-recording the narration. If that changes, this page will say so.