Writing a book using memoir - different language than English

Question

I'd like to write a book using the memoir class - is it possible to change the main language of the document to something else than English, e.g. German?

Answer 1

This is done in the same way as for the standard classes: Add the line

\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}

to your document preamble. Among other things, this will change the hyphenation patterns to German (new orthography) and use German labelings for the Table of Contents heading, figures, tables etc. (This assumes you're compiling your document with pdfLaTeX; for XeLaTeX, the polyglossia package would be the correct choice.)

Note that while the memoir class incorporates the functionality of many packages that would have to be loaded separately when using a standard class, memoir " does not touch upon areas like those that are covered by the babel or hyperref packages or any related to typesetting mathematics" (introduction to the manual).

Also have a look at section 2.5 "International Language Support" of the (Not So) Short Introduction to LaTeX2e.

Answer 2

As lockstep already answered.

Though, there may be a few names within memoir that does contain an English name by default, and are not controlled by babel. These may need to be changed by hand. E.g.

\renewcommand\appendixpagename{...}
\renewcommand\appendixtocname{...}

these are used by the \appendixpage macro, and are not controlled by babel.