I saw your post about changing your locale with Bing, but I want to change it to Saudi Arabia and every time I do, it switches to Arabic. Can I have a location of Saudi Arabia and have Bing remain using English?
There’s a strange relationship in most software between location and assumptions of language that you’re hitting the edge of with your desire to have Bing know that you’re located in Saudi Arabia while still remaining in English. Ask French speakers in the United States, or German speakers in Italy, or Tagalog speakers in Hong Kong, or… well, you get the idea. In fact, language and locale should be completely independent of each other for a well designed service but rarely is so.
With its huge worldwide audience, Microsoft knows this better than most and it offers the ability to switch things around, but in a somewhat subtle manner.
First off, when you first log in to Bing.com you will likely have it invite you to set up your location information for the weather widget:
You can set that to whatever you want, from Hafr Al-Batin to Paris, France, but it’s not what’s going to get you the language and locale you seek, so let’s skip past it.
Instead, click on the gear wheel icon on the top right of your Bing.com page to pull up the menu:
As the cursor suggests, click on “Settings” to proceed…
Now here’s where it gets more than a bit confusing, because there are three places you specify your location and/or language. First, the search app itself:
Then there’s your display language:
And finally, there’s your actual location:
Click on “Change your region” and you’ll see just how global Bing.com’s customer base is. It’s quite impressive:
And here’s where it gets a bit weird: click on “Saudi Arabia” and it doesn’t just change the setting, it immediately takes you back to the Bing home page with a new location-specific image and all menus and information shown in Arabic. Even though we still have “English” as the display language:
It’s a bit hard to see with this screen shot, I admit, but not only is it all in Arabic, it’s also switched to a right-to-left language too, with the settings and preferences icon on the left side now. A close up:
Ah, but what’s that “English” setting there?
Click on it and you’ll find it has exactly what you want! It switches you to the English display language as you desire, without having to even go into settings at all:
Now that you know about the “English” button, it should be no surprise that on the top right of this particular layout there’s an “Arabic” button too:
That’s the secret of getting Bing to work as you desire. In terms of other sites, well, good luck!