How to change default language back to English?

[Mitchel Meijer]

Hello,

Last week I noticed Jira cloud changed the interface/default language the Dutch/Nederlands. I am Dutch but the Dutch language in Jira is terrible, I want it back to English. Does anyone now where I can change the language back to English? or if this is a Bug, where can I report it.

My settings

• Index language is 'Dutch' (Nederlands)
• Default language (Standaard taal) is 'Englisch'

[Daniel Eads · Accepted solution]

**Update 12/13/2019**

Earlier this week, Atlassian accounts began honoring the language preferences set for an entire Atlassian account at:
https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences
rather than the preferences set individually in Jira and Confluence. 

Please visit the link above to set the language preferences for your Atlassian account. Note that due to the way the preferences are implemented across applications, you may see a short delay between updating the language on your Atlassian ID and it taking effect in Jira and Confluence. Thanks!

--------------------------------------

Hey all!

Thank you for the effort you’ve all put into detailing the issue with changing Jira’s language and the steps you’ve taken to get it working. In the last few months we resolved a bug that prevented English from being set in Jira’s preferences if your browser had another language set in its own preferences. After reviewing many of the cases you all described, I believe this issue should be resolved for everyone. Please let me know if you are still encountering trouble setting the language preferences!

Thanks,
Daniel | Atlassian Support

[Adrian Iftode]

Looks good! Thanks

[Rajas Gujarathi]

The problem seems to exists.

My browser says "English" as the language, however, JIRA shows it in some other language. (apparently, I cannot read it to identify the language)

Can someone please help?

[Julien MEYER]

Same problem here, my default language is set to English but it keeps displaying a different language (Jira and Confluence).

EDIT : The answer of Mitchel below fixed the problem as it was the web browser(Google Chrome) forcing the translation of the interface in a desired language. Changing to english your chrome language fixed it for me.

[James Malgieri]

Reading this whole page it appears someone at Atlassian had the bright idea to allow the browser's language settings, on the browser that you are using for JIRA, overwrite the JIRA's own default language settings. see Mitchel Meijer Mar 05, 2018

To make a bad idea worse, now the time zone is somehow involved. For example, if you want JIRA text to be in English, set the time zone, for example, "Timezone: Region: Americas / GMT -05 (New York) < or any other US time zone"

Am I the only one who finds this totally unacceptable?

[Florian Scholz]

Hey, for us the language also switched to not english anymore. Seems to take it by the timezone. How can we still use the default company language? Or set any?

[Florian Scholz]

I could switch it back at https://<domain>.atlassian.net/wiki/users/viewmysettings.action
Somehow it was set to detect by browser etc...  And first time we noticed it.

[Daniel Eads]

Hey @Rajas Gujarathi - I've reached out to you via email. Based on your account's information, I think you might be on a Server instance rather than Jira Cloud.

@Julien MEYER I think that's unexpected behavior now - thank you for letting us know your setup. We'll dig into this a little more!

[DH]

As you can see, my settings are English for standard language, but it still is forcing swedish as that is the language of my brownser. 
This is a extremely poor way of handling language, if the owner of the project wants the sites to be in english for the customers it should also be shown in english. 

It gets very distracting when working in a multi-lingual and international team if everyone have different languages when they all prefer to have this site in english but there is no way to fix it.

This is a very old issue, it should be fixed.

[DH]

Florian Scholz has the solution for a temporary solution and needs to be done individually on every persons profile.

Go to https://<YOURDOMAIN>.atlassian.net/wiki/users/viewmysettings.action 

and edit the settings to english (or other prefered language). 

I did change language in my browser but still had the site shown in swedish.
After doing what florian said, i finaly had the sites in english.

[Sepi Shokri]

This but is not resolved. I'm experiencing this issue today with French. French is not in my list of browser languages, my JIRA language is set to English, and my computer language is English and French is not in my list of languages.

[David Kendi]

Same problem, everything is set to English and Jira is in Local language

[Sebastian Wilk]

You can just change the order of the languages in Chrome:

setings/advanced/languages

and just change order so the English will be the first one.

Native language can be left as a UI language and "language for translation into.."

It works with my Jira - I have Chrome in my native-Polish, and all Jira is back in English :)

[David Kendi]

I use Firefox (latest version 71), and in browser I set all language setting to English, but it didn't helped (after restart).

[Sepi Shokri]

There's no languages option in the advanced settings menu, just the general one, which is already set to English.

[Gabriel Barreneche]

Both Jira and Chrome set with English as selected language, Jira still uses my local language. All my clients are english speakers, so this is really really annoying when sharing my screen.

[Olavi Vaino]

Same problem here.

Its major frustration, stop it!

[Sepi Shokri]

My System Admin figured it out. Try checking your settings here https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences 

[Olavi Vaino]

Thanks a lot! This worked.

I definitely didn't change it. So its breaking change from atlassian.

And how is one supposed to be able to navigate there (without direct link given by someone) if UI is in foreign language?

[David Kendi]

Thank you, this worked, after 10 minutes everything is back to english.

[Daniel Eads]

As noted by @Sepi Shokri and @Edgar Garcia , the language settings moved from Jira/Confluence specific profile settings to sitting at the Atlassian ID level (and are shared across both applications now). You can access the account-level language settings here: https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences

[Andrew Shevchenko]

account preferences page does change language, but at some point it will just stop working. my issue right now is trying to check my billing info and it's in local language I don't speak despite I did make sure https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences has English (US) selected. there seems to be no way to force it back to english

[Daniel Schenk]

I agree that the Dutch translation in Jira is terrible. In SW development, we Dutch people just use a lot of the original English terminology. I've never heard anybody say 'vrijgaveopmerkingen' instead of release notes, it sounds so silly!

Apart from that, there are quite some grammatical mistakes too, it just feels as if somebody without any knowledge of Dutch used Google Translate and accepted it as-is.

Please use qualified translators with knowledge of the matter and context!

[Deleted user]

@Mitchel Meijer please remove the accepted answer as this still isn't solved actually. Atlassian please change this asap as this is terrible that I cannot even set the default language to English.

[Marleeen Kluijver]

Correct it is still not resolved

[James Malgieri]

If the default language is now based on the default setting for a browser then why does JIRA/Confluence have a default setting.  This is a terrible idea.

[Marleeen Kluijver]

Agree

[Mitchel Meijer]

Jira has a new feature, that is translating based on your browser settings.

So in Chrome my language  was 'Nederlands (Dutch)'.

I changed my browser language setting to English and see there, Jira is in English again!  

[Daniel Serodio]

Thanks, I've been looking for this :) Choosing the  user's default language may be based on the browser settings, but there should be an option to override this in the user's profile.

[Torben Ulricht]

Yes - thank you.

I have spend so much time trying to find out where to change the language settings for my team. And I totally agree, this shouldn't be automatic, there should be a way to override this.

[Jack Sparrow]

Thank you,

my Chrome language was set to English, but I had to reorder "Order languages based on your preference" to make Jira know I prefer English *more* than all other languages

[Trinh Nguyen]

I have the same problem and thanks to this post.

I removed the Vietnamese language in Chrome and the default English is back.

Thank you!!

[JayMads]

Not a good solution, as changing this in the browser impacts language selection on a lot of other unrelated websites. Jira already has a setting for defining the language, irrespective of the browser; it just doesn't work.

[Deleted user]

Thank you, big help here

[wanshanloo]

My browser default language is English but it is showing Polish in my confluence. Google translates it to English. The experience is terrible!

[Sebastian Wilk]

You can just change the order of the languages in Chrome:

setings/advanced/languages

and just change order so the English will be the first one.

Native language can be left as a UI language and "language for translation into.."

It works with my Jira - I have Chrome in my native-Polish, and all Jira is back in English :)

[Brigitte Van Gerven]

Dutch is my native language, but I need to report to the customer in English, so it is very inconvenient that JIRA shows everything in Dutch ! I really think the language setting in JIRA should be independent from the browser settings.

[Niels van der Marel]

you should move the preferred language up to the top, in the chrome language settings. this will change Jira to your preferred language  

[Jakub Sułkowski]

I have this issue too, even if it is said to be fixed, my default language is set to english, but still all the ui is in polish

[Sepi Shokri]

Same but with French.

[natalia]

I have the same problem! My Chrome is set in English and Jira translates everything to bad Spanish, I can understand those words either...

[Eelke van der Bij]

Is there someone at atlassian aware that this is still an issue? 

[Di Chen]

yes. I have the issue.

[Sepi Shokri]

I am also having this issue. Everything is showing in French (which luckily is a language I speak) but my JIRA is set to English, French is not a language in my browsers list, and my computer is set to English and also does not have French in the langauge list.

[Victor Eg Frølund]

This makes Jira almost useless to me. It is a horrible trend in UI to assume the language from the browser or OS. Many of the terms used don't really exist in danish and the english terms are always used in speech. Backlog is called backlog and so forth, but for some reason translators insist on inventing words that make no sense and completely undermines the use of the product. Sorry, rant over! Please fix!

[Adrian Iftode]

Very frustrating, half Romanian, half English and I need English only.

While I'm a Romanian native, I don't want to translate every action on Jira from Romanian to English.

Changing browser settings didn't work, btw.

[Bengt Ove Sannes]

Just signed up to test Jira and I am struggling with this before creating a single issue. Not cool. Not willing to change my browser settings for this.

[Maxplus Mail]

Hi, I also had to change my Chrome browser language setting.

Not very handy that the browser setting wins from the Jira backend setting...

[Nitin_Surana]

Is there a url I can access to change the language ? 

id.atlassian.com is showing up in a weird language even though the one selected in my browser is English.

Please provide a url to change the language to english.

[Bruno]

I want to change from Portuguese to English. I already try to change the configuration but it doesnt work. The website layout is still in Portuguese

[Bruno]

Finally solved ... -_-

[Robert Los]

I concur with the above. Let the Jira setting decide the preferred language and not the browser. Sometimes I work at another location where I cannot change the browser setting.

[Maimuna Zannar]

I need to get back to the English version of language as I can't  read Urdu don't understand or speak it. Please help me get back  to the English.Thanks.

[Arlen Rios]

Right now you must contact support to do those changes. 

Message I get from my settings when I am trying to change the language.

"Temporarily, currently only sysadmin can change indexing language and reindex all documents. Contact Atlassian Support if you need help. "

[Andrejs_Kaigorodovs]

I had the same issue in a different Chromium-based browser (Yandex Browser) and was able to fix the nuisance by installing "Advanced Page Language Switcher" extension and setting my default language in it to English. Now I have Russian as my first language in the browser (which allows translating any content to Russian) and my JIRA is displayed in English.

[Jira Jira]

It works for me too! Thank you so much I spent like 50 minutes struggling with it.

[James Malgieri]

Oh boy! A new "language" plugin by proxy

[DortheMaj]

This solved my mixed language issue:

With the following settings, the UI is a mix of portuguese / english, no matter what languages are selected in general or personal settings

General settings:
Default Language: English (United States)
Timezone: Region: Americas / GMT -03 (Sao Paulo)

Personal settings:
Language: English (United States)
Timezone: Region: Americas / GMT -03 (Sao Paulo)

With this other setting, the interface is 100% in english or 100% in portuguese, base on the user personal settings

General settings:
Default Language: English (United States)
Timezone: Region: Americas / GMT -05 (New York) < or any other US timezone

Personal settings:
Language: English (United States) / portuguese (Brazil)
Timezone: Region: Americas / GMT -03 (Sao Paulo)

[francebaril]

I got some success by changing my time zone too. Still have the French user profile but most of everything else is in English, even the pop ups from the French profile... Obviously, it's not just about getting the right language setup. My timezone however is now 7 hours late!

[Alf Nilsson]

It's ridiculous that I need to change my browser setting to be able to change language for an application.

Please add a setting so that I manually can change which language I want to use.

[Mykyta]

Hi,

I changed my default language in JIRA to Russian, however everything is still in English. 

[Jared]

Any updates here? My boards are in Spanish even though I have my language set to English :/

[Luděk Škaroupka]

Hi community. I found a solution, that helped in all cases in our company: (OS: Windows, preferred browser: Chrome, Jira Cloud)

1/check in your personal Windows language settings, that you have added also another English language (English US, English UK)

• ! I think, it is not enough to have the option "English for translations"

• If you add the language properly, then you´ll have the possibility to switch the languages by using ALT+Shift, and there is an icon for languages in the right bottom corner of your Windows taskbar

2/ set your personal user account in Atlassian into English

• you can find it, if you click on your avatar in the left bottom corner in Jira

• I am not sure, how timezone works in this case. I have Berlin/Prague
• Global Jira setting are in English

3/ go on any Jira page (e.g. Backlog) and add "&locale=en" at the end of URL

It can take a few seconds/minutes, because of Cloud. And dont forget CTRL+F5. 

Hope this helps

[fercamp]

Having a setting in the aplication (default language - Jira) that doesnt do what is expected to do... "to set the default language" seems a a bad UX implementation. 

But it is solved since you can go to the main atlassian settings and change the language there, that will replicate to all your atlassian aplications (very strange implementation but that´s how it works). 

[Alexander Chertovsky]

few days ago it started display russian and moreover, its not just display. integrated apps also see some issue boards translated and it does not works.

[Edgar Garcia]

Try checking your settings here https://id.atlassian.com/manage-profile/account-preferences 

See https://jira-core.status.atlassian.com/incidents/0nwzfd12sy5j for more info

[Erez]

This one helped! thanks a bunch. I've no idea why something so simple had to be so complex. Mine became Spanish even though I don't have Spanish installed anywhere. The configuration page showed everything is set to English. So many bug reports and still nothing?

[Carlos Felipe Domingues e Oliveira]

I'm also having this issue. Language settings are an absolute mess. 

• When Jira first loads, it's shown in English. Then in a few milliseconds, it switches to Portuguese.
• My Jira default language (under System > ...) is set to English.
• My browser (Chrome) uses English as its default language.
• My Jira profile is shown in English.
• My Jira profile default language is set to English.
• Confluence was being shown in Portuguese, with a lot of random English stuff. It decided to choose Portuguese as its default language for me. Unlike Jira, changing its default language to English actually did the trick.

I have no idea where Jira gets its language config from. It just decided it's going to be Portuguese and that's it.

Choosing your display language shouldn't be that hard.