Remove language UI selector

[Popolechien]

Looking at https://dev.library.kiwix.org/viewer#gutenberg_de_all_2026-03 (which is in German), there is a very prominent language selector at the top (which seems to default to English). But, I am not sure what this does besides changing the ZIM name's to that language.

vs.

Same number of books, same order they are displayed in (not shown), albeit title says "Project" instead of "Projekt". It would be simpler if the UI would default to the ZIM file's purported language.

Note: this selector is different from the language selector right next to it, which is a filter for books in other languages but present on the ZIM. I find the proximity increases confusion.

[benoit74]

I agree there is confusion.

Using the ZIM purported language and dropping the ability to switch UI language is kinda nice, albeit a bit sad (it is not like it "costs" us much besides solving UI/UX issue, impact on ZIM size is negligible)

I see some downsides (no blocker from my PoV):

• what about the mul ZIM? UI will be in English for all books, right? same for any ZIM with more than one requested language in fact
• not all UI strings are translated, so we will continue to have a mix of English + ZIM purported language in the UI
• we had a feature to automatically switch UI to browser language, so this will get dropped as well (or not re-implemented to be precise, I think it is missing ATM)

If we agree we should drop this, I would suggest we also drop the language filter when the ZIM has been built with only one language requested (i.e. in our current ZIMs we publish, keep the language filter only in mul ZIM).

[kelson42]

Here a few remarks on my side:

• UI language chooser does not make sense in case of monolanguage ZIM. This is a regression.
• Multi-language is not that an easy topic, but experience has shown that this both necessary and a UI challenge...
• UI language (in case of mul) must be set automatically according to UA language (is a regression)
• Completion of UI translation is a very different topic. We can handle directly in TW (completion thresold in percent). My overall feeling is that we are not strict enough in general on this topic.

At this stage I would not recommend to drop Lang selector for mul, without further discussion... because it is to me a very legit point (just not straight to solve).

[Popolechien]

Multi-language is not that an easy topic, but experience has shown that this both necessary

We've had this discussion many times over and I still believe that offering mul content generates more friction and work than actual value-added service. We still lack hard data or specific user feedback indicating they would want to download multilanguage ZIM files.

[kelson42]

Multi-language is not that an easy topic, but experience has shown that this both necessary

We've had this discussion many times over and I still believe that offering mul content generates more friction and work than actual value-added service. We still lack hard data or specific user feedback indicating they would want to download multilanguage ZIM files.

This is a totally different question and last time we discussed it, I have given the rational behind my reasoning: look to the download stats, i don't manufacture them.

[benoit74]

At this stage I would not recommend to drop Lang selector for mul, without further discussion... because it is to me a very legit point (just not straight to solve).

Do I get it correctly that it means that we still need to reimplement correctly:

• for mono-language ZIMs (based on what is required, not on which languages we finally have in the ZIM due to books being in multiple languages), UI language is the request language. period.
• for other ZIMs, UI language is automatically set based on user-agent language, with a fallback to English (should the user-agent language not be translated at all) and no possibility to switch to another language

Is that ok for you?