diff --git a/app/static/js/cqi/api/client.js b/app/static/js/cqi/api/client.js
index 9b84336d..92e423a8 100644
--- a/app/static/js/cqi/api/client.js
+++ b/app/static/js/cqi/api/client.js
@@ -631,9 +631,7 @@ cqi.api.APIClient = class APIClient {
     const fn_name = 'ext_corpus_static_data';
     const fn_args = {corpus: corpus};
     let compressedEncodedData = await this.#request(fn_name, fn_args);
-    let encodedData = pako.inflate(compressedEncodedData);
-    let textDecoder = new TextDecoder();
-    let data = textDecoder.decode(encodedData);
+    let data = pako.inflate(compressedEncodedData, {to: 'string'});
     return JSON.parse(data);
   }