If it possible to force websites to automatically use English language if you are in a non-English speaking country

There is no universal solution, but two common partial solutions.

Your browser sends an Accept-Language: header which indicates your language preference. This should be configurable in your brower's preferences. Here is a link to the W3C's guideline for how to do this in many popular browsers: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-priorities and here I excerpt their instruction for current versions of Chrome:

Open Language and Input Settings and add the language or language+region choice you want from the list available. Order the resulting list so that it is in descending order of preference. You don't need to restart Chrome.

However, some sites annoyingly ignore or override your Accept-Language: preference e.g. based on your apparent geographic location. As a possible remedy, you can use an anonymizing VPN; some are free, and some allow you to set which geographic region you would like to appear to be in (though many are either non-free, or lack this facility).

However, perhaps also note that some sites also serve different content based on geolocation; so they might show you offers which are not valid in your region, or fail to show you offers which you would be eligible for if they were able to figure out where you are.

tripleee

Posted 2018-04-22T15:39:06.543

Reputation: 2 480

Printer manufacturers and Swedish companies in particular seem to be hellbent on refusing to serve you the content you want in the language you prefer. But perhaps my sampling is biased. – tripleee – 2018-04-23T05:52:47.763

Even damn facebook ignore "Accept-Language" header – VarunAgw – 2018-04-23T09:04:04.773

1Actually, Facebook in particular can be expected to be more annoying than other sites, and to gratuitously ignore standards, conventions, interoperability, and user preferences. I hear there's a discussion about their ethics, too. – tripleee – 2018-04-23T09:26:54.153

But more generally, sites which try to get you to register and log in before you get to view content or otherwise interact meaningfully with them may well decide to willfully ignore the preferenoes of anonymous visitors as yet another nudge to get you to give up your anonymity. – tripleee – 2018-04-23T09:30:24.450

Right. I was a bit taken aback when you wrote "even Facebook" but apparently you were not actually singling them out as likely to care. – tripleee – 2018-04-23T13:07:11.627

This sounds like it should be the solution. In my experience there is hardly any site though that actually does anything with this header. "some" can better be replaced with "most" I think. Maybe it would be nice to include a list of some popular sites that do use it to show that this solution does work for some things. – Kvothe – 2018-08-31T17:42:15.610

Apache and I believe Nginx and many CMSes do exactly the right thing out of the box, so it should not be hard to find examples of sites which work correctly, though they're likely to be smaller and older sites. I guess the root problem is that many browser users don't set their preferred language at all, and so golocation-based heuristics are in some sense better than "one size fits all". – tripleee – 2018-09-01T07:58:53.887

It would be useful if you'll supply some example website – arieljannai – 2018-04-22T17:13:53.727

@arieljannai Google, facebook (among the most common) – VarunAgw – 2018-04-22T20:19:12.123

I've the same problem! My company has a proxy in Poland, visiting sites like Microsoft or HP often wrongly identifies might location and show me Polish content which I don't understand at all. – Máté Juhász – 2018-04-23T05:12:16.247

One solution I found was to rewrite url using chrome extension. It works for many sites. So if you live in Germany, you can do like /de/ with /en/ and /de-de/ to /en-us/ – VarunAgw – 2018-04-23T09:05:44.663

If it possible to force websites to automatically use English language if you are in a non-English speaking country

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