Language files are 779 MB across your apps, not the gigabytes claimed

Every Mac application ships translations for dozens of languages, one folder per language inside the app bundle. A whole category of cleanup tool exists to delete the ones you do not read, and the pitch is always measured in gigabytes.

Count yours before deciding

# Every language folder under /Applications, added up once
find /Applications -name "*.lproj" -type d -prune -print0 2>/dev/null |
  xargs -0 -n 50 du -sk 2>/dev/null |
  awk '{s+=$1} END {printf "%d folders, %.0f MB\n", NR, s/1024}'

# The worst offenders, app by app
for a in /Applications/*.app; do
  l=$(find "$a" -name "*.lproj" -type d -prune -print0 2>/dev/null |
      xargs -0 -n 50 du -sk 2>/dev/null | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s+0}')
  [ "${l:-0}" -gt 20000 ] && printf "%6.0f MB  %s\n" "$((l/1024))" "$(basename "$a")"
done | sort -rn

Why the total is smaller than it used to be

• Apps are downloaded thinned. The App Store delivers what your Mac needs rather than every variant, so much of this was already removed before it arrived.
• Assets moved out of language folders. Modern apps keep images and media once, not once per language.
• The big bundles are media, not text. A 2 GB application is 2 GB of frameworks, models and artwork, and a few megabytes of strings.

What stripping them actually costs

That is the trade: a few hundred megabytes, once, against applications that may need reinstalling. It is the same arithmetic as the rest of the Mac storage myths, and the reason it keeps being sold is that a per app percentage sounds impressive while the total does not.

If the Applications folder is genuinely large, the answer is usually two or three applications rather than the translations inside all of them: the Applications folder sorts that out in one pass, and anything you remove should go through what an uninstall leaves behind.