Live Chat Localization: How to customize your live chat widget for your language

In this article we're going to show you how you can customize your live chat for multiple languages.   When you have a business that supports visitors in multiple languages, it's important that you provide them with the best live chat experience. 

There are 4 main language localization features we will show you how to customize to support multiple languages.

• Customize the visitor live chat widget text for a specific language
• Deploy language specific chat widgets to different areas of your website
• Automatically translate text between a visitor's language and your agent's language
• Tell your AI Chatbot to respond in a specific language

So let's discuss how you can use each of these features to provide your visitors the best support. 

Customize the visitor live chat widget text for a specific language

With our live chat solution, every visitor facing message is fully customizable.  So whether you want to translate the text to another language, or just change the language to better represent your brand, you can do it here.

First login to Social Intents directly or you can also access your Live Chat settings from Microsoft Teams if you are using the teams integration.

The navigate to 'My Apps' and select 'Edit Settings' next to the chat widget you want to customize.

Once you click on the Customize Text tab, you'll see each field that your visitor can see. Manually change these to your language of choice.  

If you want to support 3 languages in total for instance, English, Spanish, and German, you could create a total of 3 chat widgets and customize the text settings for each chat widget accordingly.

In the following section, we'll discuss deploying the chat widgets to your website separately.

Deploy language specific chat widgets to different areas of your website

So now that you have multiple chat widgets configured as below, you can now copy the code snippet specific to each chat widget to the corresponding areas of your website.

Are you see below, we have 3 different language specific live chat widgets set up and each has it's own code snippet to include on your website.

So if you have different html templates or common files for the different language specific areas of your website, you can deploy accordingly.

If this is not the case and say you are using WordPress with some automatic path type translations, you can still use these chat widgets, but you will just use the common account level shared code snippet (the same code snippet for all chat widgets), and set up your URL targeting for each.

The account level snippet is located in the left side bar as below.

You'll notice that the script just includes the /api/ path in the code but not an /api/chat/ path for this.

<script src="https://www.socialintents.com/api/socialintents.1.3.js#2c9fa49282044fba0182037298ac0022" async="async"></script>

Now, head over to the Targeting tab of each chat widget, and set up the paths to include for each chat widget and also those to exclude.  Note that when you use the targeting, if you have an empty field for the inclusion, the chat widget will be included on all pages regardless of language.  So it's important that you set up the targeting when using the account level code snippets or the WordPress plugin with multiple language.

In our example, we're including the English Chat widget on pages with /en/* and excluding from /es/* and /de/* paths.  You would set this up for each language you support.

Automatically translate text between a visitor's language and your agent's language

Now that you have the chat widgets deployed for your multi-lingual website, you may want to leverage our live translation feature.  This is helpful if your agents don't speak the same language as the website visitor.

What is Live Chat Translation?

Live Chat translation is when a live chat session is translated for both agents and visitors in real-time.  When your agent speaks one language and the visitor another language, live chat translation uses real-time translation of chat messages back and forth between these two languages.  From each user's perspective, they receive the message in their own language.

The experience is seamless and the visitor will see all messages in their default language. 

How does Live Chat Message Translation Work?

As an example, say your customer from Brazil starts a live chat with you in Portuguese.  You speak English.  In this case, when the live chat message comes in to you, simply open the chat session, click on the Translate button and choose Portuguese as the the visitor language.  You can also auto-detect the visitor language to automatically determine which language the visitor is speaking.

Say your visitor starts the chat in Portuguese.

As an agent, when you receive the chat, you simply click the Translate button, and choose the language of the visitor or Auto-Detect to have the system automatically determine the visitor's language.

Once you choose Portuguese, any message from the visitor will be translated from Portuguese to your preferred language.  In this case, the chat widget preferred language is English.

Now, you can respond in English and the visitor will see the translated text in Portuguese.  They can ask another question and from your side you will see the message translation as well as the original non-translated question as you can see below.

The visitor will just see you responding in their language.

Tell your AI Chatbot to respond in a specific language

Lastly, if you are using our ChatGPT AI chatbot to either answer chats or to augment your existing agent staff, you can use the Chatbot Instructions to tell a specific chat widget to respond in the visitor language.  You can leave it up to ChatGPT to automatically detect the language and respond accordingly, or instruct the chatbot to respond in the localized language by default.

In the example below, we are using the Chatbot Instructions to tell the ChatGPT chatbot to respond in German:

Now you have a fully customized chatbot for each language you choose.