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Comment by JimDabell | Hacker News Reader

> Interestingly, Google does respect the Accept-Language header. While testing in Yelp domain, Google Sign-In widget popup appeared in Japanese.

I’m surprised by this. In my experience, Google are the one big organisation that I can count on to get this completely and utterly wrong. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been stuck with a Google interface, popup, or some other thing that is in a language I don’t speak, just because I was visiting another country. I’ve specifically encountered it repeatedly with the very Google Sign-In widget they say works for them.

Sure, if it happens to be a Google website and you know the magic incantation of &hl=en then you can sometimes work around it, but that doesn’t help when it’s a Google login from another website or something of that nature.

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Indeed, google never behaves for me, always hands me language localized to my ip, even though my Accept-Language contains "en-US,en;q=0.9" (the local language is my native one, but i find using services or software that are originally in English translated to my (non-PIE) language awful, even anger-inducing).

For search i have had &hl=en added to the search parameters since forever.

What works surprisingly often is setting language to en-UK instead. Apparently many sites consider en-US to be some default that they can safely ignore, but en-UK to be a deliberate choice. Nowadays I use that not just for the browser, but for my phone and computer too.

I can say that it doesn't work on Google Docs, which uses the IP address's language^, even though my language is set to en-UK. Unless you're logged in, but I often have to use incognito because of another misfeature which is that Google will dox you to other editors if you access a public Google doc while logged in. Googlers reading this comment: please fix this!

^ I wonder how this works in places like Switzerland and Belgium that have more than one language. The notion that IP addresses can be mapped to languages needs to die.

I had my language set to en-NZ when I lived in Indonesia; definitely had Google serve pages in Indonesian to me (and double frustratingly, with US-style dates).

One drawback I remember was that sometimes experimental features in some app are available strictly for the US (i.e. "vanilla") version, presumably simply because lack of localisation blocks it for "other" versions. (Sadly cannot recall concrete program, but I think it was some web browser.)

I found that insufficient.

Setting something that's very clearly custom (e.g. en,sv meaning English then Swedish) works for me, as I don't live in Sweden.

I presume you mean en-GB (British English) not en-UK?

Yes indeed. And I suppose any other non-US English version should do the same.

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