Maybe this has an obvious solution that I'm overlooking, but I can't seem to find the correct parameter to put in to make this happen. Using the Google Translate widget on a site, I need to set the default language that the user sees when entering the site, even though the site is english. function googleTranslateElementInit() { new google.translate.TranslateElement({ pageLanguage: 'en' }, 'google_translate_element'); } I've tried adding: defaultLanguage: 'fr' and tried: targetLanguage: 'fr' I did find some nice jQuery solutions, but didn't want to bypass this if it was an easy fix. Thanks in advance.