Why Is Everything in Chinese?

Question

Recently, I've been receiving a lot of communications in Chinese. Some examples:* Electronic service agreement updates from Microsoft Azure via email (MS account default language English)* Web ads from PG&E* Certain websites render in Chinese* Some Facebook ads render in Chinese* Spam junk snail mail from State FarmFor context, I moved to China at the beginning of 2020 before returning to the US toward the end of last year, accessing the Western web through VPN in the meantime. I don't have an ethnic Chinese name. I've always had English set as my default language for my Google and Facebook accounts. All my devices are configured to use English as the default language. My web browser does request "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7", which could maybe explain some of it, though it's obnoxious that the en-US would be overridden. I've never updated any address with any service with my Chinese one, though I guess I did use that one to sign up for Alibaba Cloud.So, what's a good theory? I don't mind seeing stuff in Chinese, per se; it's just surprising, particularly the the snail mail from State Farm, though I guess in principle it's no weirder than the email. My running theory is that I've been tagged in some obscure but widely used database as having Mandarin as my preferred language. Does this seem like a plausible reason? If so, any idea which one it is and which company owns it? My first guesses would be Google or Facebook, but by all appearances they both know I prefer English.

yosito · Accepted Answer

A lot of websites have terrible code for detecting your language preference and treat "en-US" as a default in the sense that if they get any other clue what language you may speak, they will prefer that rather than "en-US". I live in a non-English-speaking country, and I've solved this by switching all of my OS and browser language settings to "en-CA". When possible, I also list the other languages I speak after "en-CA". I get non-English sites, or sites that I don't speak the language of, far less often now. Some sites are just strange though: on YouTube the UI has been a mixture of three different languages for several months.

tr1ll10nb1ll · Answer

Not so sure about you being in some large database of the Mandarin speaking population ( could be though ) but I can confirm that Microsoft does indeed store your data even though it says it does not about your IP location history.
I can confirm this because I switched my VPN ( with firewall on ) to Netherlands ( the fastest server at the time ) for quite some time and around that time I downloaded Edge. The agreements were in Dutch given that I just accessed their website through a Dutch VPN server.
However, ever since I logged in to my Microsoft account on Edge ( which I had just downloaded ), I started getting the promotional emails in Dutch which I find to be weird, not because it didn't make sense, but rather because they collected my IP location history.

Erlangen · Answer

I had similar issues with Hotmail more than five years ago , albeit none right now. I happened to set the default language/Locale to Simplified Chinese for once, and changed it back to English shortly afterwards. Somehow Hotmail insisted on showing everything in Chinese, its email interface, service agreement etc. So I had to go to the settings and changed it every now and then. Anyway I slowly drifted to using Linux desktop full time on my machine, and the issue disappeared magically.

muzani · Answer

I just assume that the norm is 40% of things are in English, 20% are in Chinese, the other 40% is a mix of local languages which includes either. But I live in SE Asia.
I work on a social media app where user preferences are minimally linked to content, and one of the user complaints is that there's a lot of Chinese stuff on the feed. I assume that it takes effort to identify and filter out the Chinese content.
Maybe instead of you being misidentified as a Chinese, it could be that one of the filters is disabled.

NonEUCitizen · Answer

Do you occasionally watch Chinese-language youtube videos?