Why your Google reviews show up in another language

First cause: the customer really did write in another language. That is daily life for a business on a tourist route, near a station, or in a town people pass through. The review is in French because it was typed in French, and everybody sees it that way.

Second cause: the review was written in one language and Google is showing it to you translated. The display language follows the reader rather than the listing, and your Google account or your browser is set to something other than English, often since a trip or on a work device.

Third cause: it is not your listing. A duplicate created by a contributor, an old address never closed, and the reviews you are reading belong to somewhere else.

The test takes thirty seconds and happens under the review itself. Look for "See original" or "Translated by Google". If it is there, you are in the second case and the language you are reading is not the customer’s. If it is not there, the review really is in its original language.

This is the sentence that prevents half the wrong moves. There is no listing language to set: everyone who opens your page sees it in the language of their own account, and whatever is not in it gets translated for them.

Immediate consequence: putting your Google account back into English fixes your screen and nobody else’s. It is not a setting on the listing, it is a setting on you.

Less obvious consequence, and more useful: your French customer is already reading your English replies in French, and your English neighbour is reading the French review in English. What is in front of you is never what everyone sees, and that goes for the morning panic too.

The original one, never the one on your screen. That is the whole rule, and the test above has already answered it: if "See original" appears, open it, and reply in the language you find there.

What you write is kept as you wrote it, because it is your text. It is presented to the next reader like the rest of the page, so in that reader’s language: you have nothing to translate yourself, and above all nothing to publish twice.

The rest of the method is elsewhere, because it is a different job: politeness formulas with no equivalent, the level of formality that changes from one language to the next, and what a literal translation actually produces are covered in the guide on answering a review left in another language.

If the test says the reviews really were written in another language, and there were few of them last year, you have just learnt something about your business rather than about Google.

It is then commercial information and not an incident: it is the share of your customers who do not speak your language, and they read your replies before coming. Accommodation has always known this, and managing the Google reviews of a hotel is built entirely around it; a restaurant or a coffee shop on a busy street gets there later, and often without seeing it coming.

Do not reply in English to a review written in French on the grounds that the business is in England. It is the most common mistake and the most visible one: the next reader from the same country understands they were not read.

Do not ask the customer to rewrite their review in your language. The request never succeeds, and it turns a happy customer into one being told off.

Do not report a review because it is in another language. That is not a ground for removal, and Google’s reporting page says in its own words that disagreeing with a review is not one either. A report with no admissible ground spends the only remedy you have for the reviews that do have one.