How to change Google Docs viewer interface language from English to Dutch

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1

I’m working with Google’s document viewer to display PDF files from external URLs. Currently I’m implementing this by opening the viewer in a popup window using JavaScript.

Here’s my current setup:

function displayPdfDocument(pdfUrl) {
    const viewerUrl = 'https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=' + pdfUrl;
    window.open(viewerUrl, '_blank', 'width=900,height=700,scrollbars=yes');
}

// Example usage
const documentPath = 'https://example.com/sample-document.pdf';
displayPdfDocument(documentPath);

The issue I’m facing is that the Google viewer interface always shows up in English by default. All the navigation buttons like “Next”, “Previous”, “Zoom in”, “Zoom out” appear in English.

Is there a way to modify the viewer URL or add some parameter that would make these interface elements appear in Dutch instead? I’ve tried looking through the documentation but haven’t found any language settings. Any help would be appreciated!

2

yeah, it sucks! i tried that too, adding &hl=nl but no luck. the viewer just sticks to the user’s language settings. kinda frustrating when you want everything in dutch. maybe sticking to the browser settings is the only option for now.

3

Ran into this exact problem building a document management platform for a Dutch client. Google’s viewer pulls the language from your browser settings - there’s no way to override it with URL parameters. My workaround was telling users to check their browser language and switch their Google account to Dutch if they wanted the viewer in Dutch. Tried Google Drive’s embed viewer too, but same issue. Ended up ditching Google’s viewer entirely and going with PDF.js so I could actually control the interface language.

4

Google Docs viewer doesn’t provide an option to directly alter the interface language. It defaults to the user’s settings based on their Google account or browser preferences, which isn’t ideal for a consistent language experience like Dutch for all users.

In my experience, when developing a multilingual document portal, I encountered this limitation. I switched to using PDF.js, which is an open-source PDF viewer by Mozilla. This allows complete customization of the interface language. You can modify all the button labels, tooltips, and messages easily to display in Dutch.

An alternative method might involve embedding the Google viewer in an iframe while adding your own Dutch controls over it. However, this approach tends to be complicated, involving intricate CSS and JavaScript for positioning. Overall, I found PDF.js to be a much more straightforward solution for my needs.