Hide a Language in Multilingual Kobo Form

Is it possible to hide one language from the language selector in a form that includes multiple translations?

I want to keep all translations in the XLSForm, but force a single language for respondents and prevent switching during data collection.

Short answer: no

If your form definition includes translations, then both clients - Enketo and KoboCollect - will abide and permit the user to select which they desire; there is no way in either client to ‘disable’ one (or more) available translations.

The best you can probably do is add a default_language to your form settings of the language you desire. Both clients will then load and present this language by default. But, again, there is no way to prevent the user from changing it if they then wish to explicitly override the default.

One thing you might do would be to put all these other translations under a differently named column in your XLSForm; eg label-Spanish, instead of the correctly named label::Spanish (es) [and similarly for your translated choice labels]. These custom columns will be preserved and kept in your form by Kobo, but - because they are unrecognizable - they will not be picked up by either client as valid translations [actually, they are ignored by pyxform and dont even make it into the resulting deployed XForm XML in the first place!]. However, this also means that if you subsequently view these submissions back in Kobo, you also wont be able to switch between the different languages either.

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Additional hint:

As @Xiphware explained, you could rename the label-columns, you want to “hide”, even the column itself, e.g. XXlabel … This will remove them in the UI/application, but keep them in the XLSForm.

Later you could reset the valid names in a new form version or in a clone. You could then view this XLSForm and print it in the language version. And if you deploy it, i think, you could even see, edit and export the submitted data in this form version - at least after editing one field.

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@Kal_Lam being my equally virtuous doppleganger, of course. :wink:

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