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I have an annoying problem. I live in a foreign country. Every time I visit a new website, it set the foreign language as default.

Is it possible to set some settings or any preference or any special header (using a Chrome extension) that can request English as default language on those sites.

It doesn't have to be fool proof and work on every site but if it works on popular site, it will be awesome.

My goal is to set it once, and then it should work on all supported website.

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  • 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
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 5:12
  • 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/
    – user398328
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 9:05
  • Austrian websites simply don't care / are not able to support
    – Nikos
    Commented Mar 12 at 21:26

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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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.

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  • 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
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 5:52
  • Even damn facebook ignore "Accept-Language" header
    – user398328
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 9:04
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    Actually, 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
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 9:26
  • 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
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 9:30
  • 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
    Commented Apr 23, 2018 at 13:07

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