Warning: video contains vulgar language.

This is something that has been annoying me for a while. I often use my wife’s PC which is Japanese and Google Chrome automatically detects the language and displays menus etc. in Japanese. That doesn’t bother me so much as I can find my way around Chrome easily enough.

What annoyed me was that it also changed the default language for other Google products such as Adsense and Google Affiliate Network. I didn’t realize the problem was with Chrome until today though. Previously I searched those products settings looking for how to change the default language from Japanese to English. I couldn’t find the settings. Of course it is not easy to find things that don’t exist. And I don’t feel as confident checking the settings in Japanese as I do in English.

Anyway, I found the above video on how to change Chrome’s default language from Japanese to English and despite the crude language it works well. I didn’t seem to work for me at first though as when I restarted Chrome the settings hadn’t changed.

At first I thought it was because Chrome needed to be updated and so I updated it but that didn’t work and then I thought that it was because Chrome was synced with Chrome on my own PC but that didn’t make sense because my PC is in English already.

Then it occurred to me that Chrome wasn’t actually shutting down and went to the Windows Task Manager and under Processes I could see that there were many instances of Chrome running. I terminated the processes, restarted Chrome and bingo, the Chrome default language is now English. And so is the default language of Adsense and Google Affiliate Network etc.

This is a tutorial for how to change Chrome’s default language from English to Japanese but I am sure it works just as well with other languages.