Involuntary language change of youtube account

Thanks for your reply. Yeah i used your method last time and it still wouldn't set back to English language. The only thing that worked for me to fix this language problem was to: 1.clear private data on my browser then 2. go to youtube and relogin and then magically it was in English again. But after the last time when i went back to youtube (about two days later) it had reset to Italian again.
If it goes "Italian" on me again i will again try your method. Hopefully i won't have to clear my private data again to fix it.

I just wasted ten minutes looking for this. The answer "most pages" isn't too good. Language should be a parameter in the profile.

Me again. This is still happening daily BUT now at least i can switch the language back to English and it will stay that way, at least for a while. Rating a video or making a video a favorite seems to also spur on this spontaneous language shift.

Country is UK (London)
All applications are in English (my wife translates from Russian, which is why Russian has also been activated as a secondary language input choice in Windows).
"accept-language" is reported as "en-gb,ru, q=0.5"
IP is reported as 86.134.120.138
I first noticed the problem when parts of my Firefox home pages started appearing in Russian, so I assumed it was a Firefox problem. But accessing Youtube through IE6 produces the same results. So far, all other sites accessed via either browser are 100% English. It seems to depend on whether a site offers language preferences, so it may not be specifically a YouTube problem.

I haven't tried de-activating Russian in my Windows preferences, maybe that would fix it, but I've had Russian activated for years. The Internet Explorer and Google homepages appear in English without any Russian corruption.

I live in Hong Kong - where English is an official language, in addition to Chinese.
Now finding some youtube pages are in Chinese, and no links on them for language changing (eg support)
I've tried setting my country where I am to UK: also - on an English language page - set my language preference to English, but still getting Chinese pages and no way I can see to read them in English (paste into google translate, for garbled message?!!)

Hi Phil:

Thanks for the amazingly fast reply!

1 most of my applications are in English; English (UK) where I can set it. [Mac OS- British]

2. accept-language en-gb,en;q=0.5

Well, hmmm.... - will do.

But a link on support page, re language, could surely help. [Then, say, someone who's Chinese but has poor English could visit support while in UK, and so forth.
As you appreciate - but clearly not all in google - just because someone is in a location doesn't mean they're proficient in language for that area. People presumably post to youtube while on holiday, say.
It's not that the languages aren't on google/youtube, it's just getting opportunities to see pages in language of choice.]

If google folk in charge of links/page designs don't agree, maybe could send em off on trip to foreign lands, see what they think then!

To youtube site today, and clicking on "Help Resources" at bottom of the page, taken to page in English, with option of simplified Chinese [tho HK uses traditional; not sure if will impact many people]

- if this happens thanks to your efforts, Phil, thanks very much!

Good grief, I've just gone into YouTube and tried various videos at random, and all page content is now in English. I haven't changed any settings at my end, so unless it's just a freak change in the weather, our Mr Harnish seems to done the trick. Well done, sir.
(I still have some mysterious Russian content in my Firefox homepages, but by all accounts they are less helpful about customer problems). Thanks YouTube

I have encountered similar problems as above.

Reading the posts here I have learned how to change the language from Japanese back to English, but the problem I have now is that it takes me to the Japanese site.

Last night I visited youtube for the first time on this new computer. I followed a link in a post to a video on the Japanese YouTube. It assigned me to Japanese even though English is the only language preference I have in Vista. Following the advice given here I changed the language back to English. Now I need to learn how to change the default YouTube location back to a global or north american one instead of the japanese sight.

I am running Vista on a brand new install and using IE

Currently anytime I visit YouTube it takes me to jp.youtube.com

I have no idea how to fix it.

What country/region/city do you live in?

USA - East Coast

What language are most of your applications in?

All in English

What value is in "accept-language" when you visit this page? (ex: "en-us,en;q=0.5")

en-us

What IP does this site report? (ex: "24.5.79.31")

76.26.83.241

Any Advice?

I have the exact problem that DocMartin has (I live in HK) but am not able to fix it. My youtube help resources pages even turn up in Chinese and there isn't even a link for changing it to English. What did you guys do? When I change the language settings

Oh, didn't finish... when I change the language setting nothing happens.

I live in Japan and have a Japanese OS. Despite the fact that I set my language preference for English in Youtube (via both location and language) and have set my language preference in the browser to English, Youtube detects Japanese on my system and keeps displaying in Japanese.

By the way, is there anyway of adding &l='en' or &la='en' (or some such) to the URL, so that I could change language via a link?

I have got it. To change language via a link, add &hl=en for English or & hl=ja for Japanese.

Wow, an employee of Youtube no less.

That page told me I am set to both English and Japanese
en-gb,ja;q=0.5
Perhaps that is why Youtube serves me both

I wish I knew more about Youtube URLS. They are so arcane that even Youtube employees do not know what they do?

I don't suppose you know what to put in a url to turn on close captions do you?

Or indeed, what are all the other goodies on the end of the url. There is a whole lot more things one can pass in the url, which would obviate the need for viewers to set them (my viewers are lazy).

Look at all the information in this:

http://jp.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?swf=h...

What are these?
htq
eurl
iurl=
t
use_get_video
load_modules

And despite having fmt=6 it is not supplying the high definition (which does exist) but for some unknown reason it *is* supplying subtitles.

tim
nospam at nihonbunka dot com

Me again. The language change is still happening. But now its only every day or two.However switching back to English manually does work at least until the next time it decides to change. Now i'm having problems posting comments about videos as well. My comments never appear under the video after i post them. Thats it for me folks too many bugs. the annoyance factor is outweighing the fun factor. I'm going on youtube sabbatical, lol.

Can anyone help me with this irratating problem that keeps happening when I goto visit Youtube?

The problem is, everytime I start up my browser, and goto visit youtube it always comes up asking me that it has set my language to English, and I have to click "OK", or "Cancel", I click ok on the setting, but when I close my browser, and then go back on later, the same screen pops up, it never used to be like this, and I don't understand why it won't keep the settings I select everytime I visit the page!

I use the latest Mozilla Firefox for browsing the web, I usually have it set to clear all my private data when I close the browser, like Passwords, Cookies, Saved Forms and Searches etc etc, and I thought that this was more than likely was what was causing youtube to keep asking me to select my default language everytime I visited, but I have tried disabling this function in Firefox to see if it was this that was causing this issue, but it still asks me when I disable Firefox from clearing my private data...

Any help would be gladly appreciated, thanks in advance

Dave

Language changes are still happening daily. But at least resetting it works for a day or two.
But why won't it post my comments?
I even tried switching back to to internet explorer ("the horror") and still it won't post my comments.

Youtube really needs to fix this. Every time this happens i stay away longer! Eventually i'll just give up on youtube.

Phil Harnish in answer to your questions posted up near the top of the page.
I am in Canada but my account is on the U.S youtube.
All my applications are in English.
accept-language en-us,en;q=0.5
And I am not going to post my IP address here.

I am having the same problem. I am in the USA. All of my applications are using English. I have no clue why YouTube has suddenly started send me to jp.youtube.com. Whenever I try to go to www.youtube.com I am redirected to jp.youtube.com. I have found the link to change my language to English, but it is still displaying jp.youtube.com.
Please let me know how to change things so that they will stop redirecting me to the Japanese site.

Thank you so much, Phil! I see now that you had posted the same instructions earlier. They appear under "The best answers from the company". I somehow missed the URL that you provided and only saw the bit about clicking on the links to the right of the logo.

I'm sorry that I made you post the URL again, but thank you so much!!!!!!

Yes, I have a problem with youtube languages, but I didn't feel like reading through all this to see if it was answered or not.

Anyway, I use google chrome and I like to switch around my languages depending on which mood I'm in, but youtube is the only site I can't make it stay with. I'll go up to the top, click on English, go through the listed languages that pop up, pick one and it'll take me there. But as soon as I click a video, it all goes back to English. I don't know why it won't stay. I've tried multiple times but no one else seems to really WANT their language switched but I do but it won't stay. lol

Got an answer? Is it just google chrome?

I'm having the same problem and it gets frustrating.

I live in Spain but I don't understand Spanish. My accept-language value is: 'en-us,en-gb;q=0.7,en;q=0.3' and my operating system and all of my applications are in English.

I use http://www.youtube.com/?gl=US&hl=en but once I click a link from the main youtube page, I get the message: "Suggested Language (we have set your preference to this): Spanish". The message is sometimes in English, but usually it appears in Spanish.

Even more frustrating is that, even after setting language to English, once I log into my account, it all resets in Spanish again and there's no way to permanently set my account language in English.

I live in Sweden, I am Swedish, Swedish is my native language, but I don't want to use a Swedish youtube! How hard can it be to remember my **** settings? I know I've explicitly set the language to english several times, but after a couple of weeks or so, youtube decides to change it. Now I can't seem to find the language settings anylonger.

What's the problem really? Do youtube think I'm stupid? This is really frustrating. You can handle information about watched videos, friends, channels, comments, favorites and so on, but you can't handle the language I want to use?

I really can't se the logic in this.

I have not cleared my cookies. My browser language is set to en. But the language still gets reset to Japanese periodically.

But I am logged out occasionally. I don't seem to be able to avoid being logged out.

It would be nice if youtube looked at the cookies, or rather, better still remembered a setting in my account.

Thanks for your reply Phil, it's appreciated.

My accept-language is sv-se,sv;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3, and I now found the settings at the page bottom, so I'm currently using english. But why do youtube change this every now and then? I'm always logged in, so it's not because of that.

Isn't my prefered language saved in a database with the rest of my setting?

Thanks for the reply Phil.

"YouTube will use your user preference and ignore the browser whenever possible but this doesn't always work (if you ever log out, for example)"

Hey, It didn't even last a day this time, it's Swedish again. And I'm logged in.

Can you please explain how your algoritm for choosing the language works more in detail? I'm myself a programmer and web developer in learning, and I can't understand how this can be so hard to get right.

Hey, what user is this? Okey, its swicswe. What language did he say he want to use? Okey, english. Lets display the page in english.

"This will greatly help YouTube understand which language you want."

But I explicitly set the language I want to use! Isn't that enough?