Changing Your YouTube.com Interface Language

For a while now, I have been incredibly annoyed with how YouTube.com automatically displays the user interface in a certain language. What makes this even worse is that you cannot change the setting anywhere in your YouTube.com profile settings. I thought that this was because detected the country that I live in (Finland) – a noobish mistake on my part. While I can speak a bit of Finnish, and read even more, it takes me a lot more time to read each word carefully so I fully understand what is written.

I found this very helpful Google support forum discussion. The user FalconXB describes exactly how to change your settings in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows XP (I have IE9 on Windows 7 – yes, it works). While this doesn’t explicitly tell you how to change your settings in Chrome, I was able to easily figure out how to change the default language.

The browsers (default browser UI languages are English!): Google Chrome 12, Mozilla Firefox 5, Opera 11.11, Safari 5.0.5

Google Chrome

Go to Options > Under The Hood (left hand side) > Languages and spell-checker settings (a button under Web Content) > Languages and Input

In the box you can add languages and drag them into the order in which you would like to use them. The language you want for YouTube.com is the language that should be at the top of the list. You can close the Options tab when you are finished.

Mozilla Firefox

Click on the orange Firefox tab at the top left hand side > hover over Options or click on the arrow (to the right of “Options”) > click on Options > in the Options window, click on Content > under Languages (near the bottom) click on the Choose… button > add a language or move the language you want for YouTube.com to the top of the list.

Opera

Click on the red Menu tab at the top left hand side > Settings > Preferences >under the General tab, near the bottom next to “Languages”, select the language you wish to use.

Changing the language here will also change Opera’s default UI language.

Safari

The only way (That I know of anyways…) to display the language you want in YouTube.com in Safari is to download Safari in the language you want. Somebody, please correct me if I am wrong…