Enable language specific DSpace Links

[Peredwel]

Submitting this request on recommendation from Tim Donohue, following a discussion in the DSpace Technical Support Google Group:

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Users at my bilingual institution would like to link to the French translation of our DSpace pages from the French version of our university webpage. Unfortunately, the Angular interface renders the website based on the preferences in the user's browser, which are typically set to English by default. French users on public computers who are attempting to access links to our institutional repository from French webpages end up viewing the interface in English. While they can switch the language manually, this is an inequitable experience for our minority language users and we'd like to avoid it.

Describe the solution you'd like

Create specific French/English language links so we can specify what version of the webpage we want a user to be routed to when they click on links from external webpages, similar to en.wikipedia.org or fr.wikipedia.org

Describe alternatives or workarounds you've considered

-Explaining to users they can change their browser preferences (takes time/effort, inequitable experience for minority language users)
-Explaining to users they can change the language of DSpace (takes time/effort, inequitable experience for minority language users)

[alanorth]

I'm not sure about linking directly to a page with a specific language, but this could be addressed in many cases if we used the language the user's browser sends in the Accept-Language header.

See a recent discussion about that: https://vitonsky.net/blog/2025/05/17/language-detection/

[Peredwel]

Thanks for the suggestion, Alan--I'm not a programmer, but isn't DSpace already be doing this?: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/e623b68d9184ad40c09902a295b2bf507766efb6/src/app/core/locale/server-locale.service.ts

(If not, what is this code doing?)

Our local issue is that we're dealing with a lot of users who don't set their browser language or know how to do so (and who then send complaints that they're being redirected to an English page from a French page).

[paulo-graca]

I think this feature could also ease caching for the same page but with a different language.

[alanorth]

Thanks for the suggestion, Alan--I'm not a programmer, but isn't DSpace already be doing this?: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/blob/e623b68d9184ad40c09902a295b2bf507766efb6/src/app/core/locale/server-locale.service.ts

Good question! My browser is set to English so I didn't notice whether this worked. Embarrassing that I have never even tried!