Periodically I get a question from someone using WordPress Google Form asking why their buttons (and some other text) is in Chinese (or some other language but Chinese is the most common)?

If you haven’t run into this problem, consider yourself lucky!  The problem manifests itself similar to the images below.

As near as I can tell, this problem happens when the Web server that is running WordPress Google Form is geographically located in a part of the world where Google thinks it should serve up a particular language.

So how do you fix it?  In the previous version of Google Forms, the solution was simple:  Add &hl=en to your form URL and Google would deliver the content in the specificed language (in the case English) – refer to to this post for more details.  Unfortunately the new version of Google Forms doesn’t support this language parameter so I have been at a loss to help people who find themselves in this situation.

For several days I have been trying to find a solution.  Adding cookies to the wp_remote_get() request, .htaccess entries, PHP locale settings, etc.  Nothing made a difference.

While at the gym this morning it dawned on me that there isn’t any reason why I couldn’t “fix” the problem by processing the HTML that Google generates with jQuery.  So that is what I have done.

I have renamed the Debug tab to Advanced Options and added the ability to define the text that will appear on the Submit, Back, and Continue buttons as well as the text which indicates fields are Required.