2027 - Remove Italian language

[marcoacierno]

Remove the locale feature. We only need to support English language

[marcoacierno]

@claude work on this

[claude]

Claude finished @marcoacierno's task in 22m 34s —— View job • claude/issue-4803-20260816-1114 • Create PR ➔

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Remove Italian language / locale feature

Done — pushed to claude/issue-4803-20260816-1114 (151 files, +1404 / −3340).

• Gather context — mapped locale usage across the repo
• Scope the change
• Drop the i18n block from next.config.js (no more /en/, /it/, default locale)
• Remove locale redirect + pyconLocale cookie from src/proxy.ts
• Reduce src/locale/index.ts to a flat English catalog; delete languages.ts / context.tsx
• useTranslatedMessage(id) / getTranslatedMessage(id) no longer take a language
• createHref drops locale
• Remove language switcher from header; footer + nav always English
• Update all pages/components (no useCurrentLanguage, no locale in getStaticProps/getServerSideProps/getStaticPaths, no duplicate it/en fetches)
• Move social-card API routes from api/[lang]/… to api/…
• Update the backend tests that mirror the changed frontend queries
• Run checks

What changed

The locale feature is gone from the frontend: URLs are no longer prefixed with /en/ or /it/, there's no locale cookie or redirect, the message catalog is English-only, and the language switcher is removed. Pages that used to fetch the same content twice (once per locale) and emit per-locale getStaticPaths entries now do it once.

GraphQL documents that hit language-aware backend fields now pass language: "en" inline instead of threading a $language variable through every page. The five backend test_*frontend_quer*.py files that mirror those documents were updated to match.

What I deliberately left alone

Talk languages are not the site locale. conference.languages, the CFP multilingual proposal fields (MultiLingualInput), and the schedule/voting "by language" filters describe the language a talk is delivered in. Those still support Italian and are untouched.

Backend i18n storage. I tried setting LANGUAGES / WAGTAIL_CONTENT_LANGUAGES to English-only and backed it out. settings.LANGUAGES currently does double duty: it's both the site locale list and the list of languages proposal content can be written in (i18n/tests/factories.py:18, i18n/fields.py:35, conferences/models/keynote.py:21). Removing it there made 3 test_send_submission.py tests fail because Italian proposal titles came back empty — i.e. it silently changes whether talks may be submitted in Italian. That, plus the I18nCharField JSON columns (~10 models still store {"en": …, "it": …}) and the existing Italian Wagtail Locale and its page tree, needs data migrations and a product call, so it's a follow-up rather than something to slip in here.

Also left: three stale /it/… hrefs in backend/demodata/cms.json, which live in that same i18n JSON storage and are never read by the frontend now.

Checks

Check	Result
npx tsc --noEmit	clean
npx @biomejs/biome check .	Checked 342 files in 211ms. No fixes applied.
pnpm codegen	all documents validate against the schema
uv run pytest -n auto (backend)	1331 passed, 16 skipped, 3 xfailed
uv tool run ruff@0.12.5 check / format --check (changed files)	All checks passed! / 5 files already formatted

Two caveats, both pre-existing on main and unrelated to this change:

• pnpm build gets through compilation and TypeScript (✓ Compiled successfully, Finished TypeScript in 8.0s) but fails at static data collection with Variable '$hostname' of required type 'String!' was not provided — CMS_HOSTNAME and CONFERENCE_CODE aren't set in this CI runner. I confirmed this by stashing my work and building a clean tree: identical failure.
• Repo-wide ruff check reports 3 errors and mypy . reports 3, all in files this change doesn't touch (schedule/tests/test_tasks.py, sponsors/tests/test_tasks.py, badge_scanner/models.py).

• branch claude/issue-4803-20260816-1114