How to get websites to open to a specific language (when available)?

Hi,
This is probably not Win 11-specific but there are so many knowledgeable people here that I thought I'd try my luck....

This has been bugging me for years, and probably thousands of other Belgian users as well.
Belgium is a trilingual country (Dutch/French/German) although the Germans are a very small minority so I'd say that the vast majority of Belgian website cater to the French, Dutch and International audience by having their websites in Dutch, French & sometimes English.

The annoyance is that virtually ALL Belgian websites (so with a .be at the end) will open in Dutch by default!
I don't know much about internet tech but my understanding was that browsers and websites communicate with each other and exchange information when connecting and I would have hoped/thought that among the shared info were some language settings. But despite having tinkered with virtually every possible OS and browser language settings, it still, years later...ALWAYS opens first in Dutch!

Is there anyway to change that??

As far as I can tell the country where the Domain is registered determines the language and author of a Domain uses that language. My Domain is in the USA and has .com for an extension. Maybe a Domain owner can have more than one registration [each registration costs] to have particular languages available. An example could be a Domain with extension of .be and also have a Domain with extension of .de or maybe another country like .za with pages of appropriate languages.

I don’t know of a permenet fix. But if you add a link to Google Translate on your bookmarks toolbar:

Go to Google Translate, select Websites, paste your link, ask it to detect language, select language to translate to.
You usually need to click the arrow twice. I believe the first click, Google checks out the site, the second click will open it

Link: Google Translate

If you want to use Google Chrome, this may be helpful:

Berton said:

...An example could be a Domain with extension of .be and also have a Domain with extension of .de or maybe another country like .za with pages of appropriate languages.

Click to expand...

No, thy way it works here and in other multilingual countries (like Switzerland which also has 3 languages) is that you just have the country extension, so .be for Belgium, and then once you click your language choice, the address will change accordingly but with the same .be extension. So e.g. www.dell.be/fr, www.dell.be/nl, www.dell.be/de.


As far as translating, that's really not necessary and not ideal since the webpage already exists in the language I want, but it's just annoying that I systematically have to make that choice EVERY single time I visit a Belgian site!
Anyway, it looks like nobody has a solution so I just have to learn to live with it I guess.
Thx just the same for trying to help!

Cher compatriote, it's indeed annoying if the site doesn't appear in your mother tongue. I'm Flemish, so I'm lucky that most .be sites appear in Dutch, but there are some that default to French (bmw.be, microsoft.com, ...).
If you use Chrome are a chromium-based browser (Edge, Brave, ...), then you can use the 'URL Auto Redirector' extension to redirector nl url's to fr url's (URL Auto Redirector - Chrome Web Store).

The following rule applies for you:
Source: ^https:\/\/(.*)\/nl(.*)
Destination: https://$1/fr$2
Check the RegExp checkbox
Enable the Enable setting

Of course, I use it the other way round.

Tous ensemble!

Maybe a few years late, but since it was revived, I'll add my two cents on it.

Generally speaking, what you can do about it is to set the "prefered webstie language" option from your browser. This setting tells every website what languages would you prefer to read in, and in what priority. Every browser has such a setting one way or another. Note that this is different and completely unrelated to the language of the browser itself (the menus, its messages and the like) or the OS language.

The practical effect of this setting is that websites get informed about your language preferences, that's all it really does.
It's then up to each and every website to respect it, sometimes it gets honored, sometimes it cannot be completely served (if the website doesn't has the requested languages it may reply in a secondary one) or it may even be completely ignored. Other than specifing your preferences and hoping they get honored, there isn't that much you can do about it.

As an example, here is the Firefox documentation about this setting. Other browsers have similar ones too.

chumbo said:

The annoyance is that virtually ALL Belgian websites (so with a .be at the end) will open in Dutch by default!
I don't know much about internet tech but my understanding was that browsers and websites communicate with each other and exchange information when connecting and I would have hoped/thought that among the shared info were some language settings. But despite having tinkered with virtually every possible OS and browser language settings, it still, years later...ALWAYS opens first in Dutch!

Click to expand...

You're correct about this, in fact this actually happens this way! The browser tells what languages do you prefer, then it depends on the website to follow the instruction or disregard it. My guess is that you have the language settings in Dutch instead of French and that's why it happens. It even be a browser default Belgian downloads (with the implicit assumption that most Belgians speak Dutch, no idea if it has some reasoning behind this).

Berton said:

As far as I can tell the country where the Domain is registered determines the language and author of a Domain uses that language.

Click to expand...

The domain a webstie is hosted has no relation at all with the language of the content it hosts. The domain determines whose authority is responsible for registering it and how the commercial rights are handled, but other than that, the website itself can be anything completely unrelated (perhaps Tuvalu is the most notable example of this).
The language depends solely on how the website is implemented and how it responds to request from browsers.