How to change Magento default admin language

Question

I have Magento 1.7.0.2 German website. How can i change the admin panel to be English by default? (i know that i can select the language from the drop down list, however i want it to be set to English by default)

Answer 1

In top menu

system > config > (general) general > locale options > locale > english (US)
be sure to set that at the "default config" scope, and log out and then in to be taken into account

Answer 2

In General, if you want a shop frontend default language that differs from the admin default language, the easiest way is:

Set Configuration -> General -> Locale Options -> Locale

• For Default Config: admin language (English)
• For Website Level: frontend language (German)

Then, on store level, you can still have other (partly translated) locales that would have the website level language as a fallback.

Answer 3

Follow the following steps and you will get what you want:

1. In your Magento admin go to System > Manage Stores
2. Click on Main Website Store under the Store Name (if there are several ones, click any of them)
3. On the next page under Store Information select a different language in the Default Store View drop-down list.
4. Click Save Store.
5. Now every time you are opening the your site, it’s going to be in the language you selected.
6. You can change the default language for the backend by going to System -> Configuration -> General -> Locale options.

Answer 4

The solution proposed in the other answer also affects the front-end, so it might not be ideal for some scenarios: For example if you have multiple stores in the front-end and their default language should be English, you might not want to set the default locale to anything other than English.

I found Aoe_BackendDefaultLanguage extension on GitHub that allows to set a default language per admin account. It seems to be working good so far and the code seems quite clean.