How can I disable the automatic translation of MS web pages?
When visiting MS Knowledge base articles many are automatically translated (into Dutch).
I prefer the original English texts so that I don't have to second guess which Dutch terms the translator (human or machine) uses.
I'm using a Dutch Win7 OS with a Dutch Firefox browser.
No language or translation related add-ons are installed.
This SuperUser artice is only about IE.
This forum discussion suggests that it is a website (owner) decision, but is also IE oriented.
I do not want to disable all geolocation info as suggested here, because it's fine when e.g. Google search results are tailored to my location.
This article refers to an unreachable FAQ, searching for 'microsoft translation faq' gives me plenty of info about the MS translation services, except how to disable it!
[Edited to add sep 2014]
I redirected www.microsofttranslator.com to 127.0.0.1 (and to ::1) in the hosts file but that does not block the translation.
This is part of the Microsoft website, not Firefox.
They do offer a link to compare the translation to the original, and on that comparison page there is a link to the original text. You can circumvent it immediately by adding /en-us to the web address.
- Take for example: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573
- add "/en-us"
- get: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573/en-us
Note that translated pages not always tell you that they are, e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573 in the case of Dutch - but maybe that page was not automatically translated.
Added note 27 July 2016: Things have changed slightly but the trick still works. If I now go to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/192573, I get https://support.microsoft.com/nl-nl/kb/192573. If I then append /en-us, this is again redirected to https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/192573.
If you are willing to change your browser-wide preferred language setting, you can request English articles by default - without using extensions.
Related StackOverflow answer here.
In case that one gets wiped: basically you need to change your language preference in your browser and move English to the top. MSDN and KB articles apparently respect the Accept-Language header sent by the browser.