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FAQ > SimPlates
What language are the plates in?

Shortest answer: Most (nearly all) plates are in English.

Short answer: English. the overwhelming majority of charts are in English, and most of the very few that are not will be easily understandable by the English speaker either because we have categorized the plates into English-language categories or because it's easy for somebody who has experience with plates to figure out most key details on even a non-English plate. In short, if you can read this in English, you will be able to utilize most of the plates in SimPlates without issue.

Longer Answer. Aviation authorities worldwide can choose to either publish their plates in the international aviation language, which is English, or in their local language. In practice, most of the charts are in English. As a rough guess, we estimate that 98%+ of the charts in SimPlates are in English. Some countries publish both in English and in the local language on the same plate in various guises - this can range from a plate where everything is in both languages to where only some key parts are in one language or the other. Even where the plate name is in a foreign language, we have normally indexed most of the plates in English, so for example if you search by "visual approach" (or "visual landing") you will successfully find French language charts coded internally as "Atterrisage a Vue." In some cases, we provide both the local language version and the English version of plates where so made available by the aviation authorities. To give you some idea of how pervasive English is, even Russia, Iran, China, and France have the bulk of their charts at least partially in English. The largest sphere of non-English plates we're guessing are Spanish and Portuguese language plates - if you're at all familiar with approach plates in general, you can normally more or less make out their content. For some countries, larger airports are available in English but local 'general aviation' airfield information is in the local language. For many if not most airports worldwide for which no English plates are provided in SimPlates, it's pretty safe to say that there are no English plates anywhere in the world produced for them, unless some company that we don't know of is off somewhere making English-language translations of small rural fields in, say, Uruguay (Spanish) or Senegal (French), so what you'll get in SimPlates is likely to be exactly the same as you'd be flying with in real life.