Chat Translations

What Is Chat Translation

Chat translation automatically translates messages between your agents and visitors in real time. When enabled, agents see visitor messages in their own preferred language, and visitor messages are translated from the agent's language back to the visitor's language. No manual copying or switching apps — translation happens inline in the conversation.

Velaro uses Google Translate, which supports 96 languages.

Enabling Chat Translation for Your Account

Go to Account Settings → General → Chat Translations and toggle Chat Translations on. This enables translation for all agents in your account across all channels (web, SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, and more).

When enabled, Velaro detects each visitor's language automatically and translates messages to match each agent's preferred language.

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Common Questions

"My agents only speak English but I get visitors in Spanish, French, and other languages."

Turn on Chat Translations in Account Settings → General and you're done. Velaro automatically detects each visitor's language and translates their messages into English for your agents. When your agents reply in English, their replies are automatically translated into the visitor's language before delivery. No additional setup is needed.

"I have a dedicated Spanish-speaking team. How do I make sure they always get Spanish, even if a visitor's browser says English?"

Set the Default Visitor Language on the team. Go to Admin → Teams, select the team, and choose a language from the Default Visitor Language dropdown. This overrides automatic language detection for all conversations routed to that team — visitors always receive messages in that language regardless of what their browser reported.

This is the right approach when you have dedicated language teams (a Spanish team, a French team, etc.) and want consistent translation without relying on detection.

"Do my agents need to configure anything to use translation?"

No, translation is automatic once the account toggle is on. Agents do not need to do anything to start receiving translated messages.

Optionally, agents can set their preferred language in Profile → Basic Information → Language. This tells Velaro which language to translate visitor messages into for that agent. If no preference is set, Velaro uses the account's default language.

Admins can set the language preference on behalf of agents from User Management → Edit User → Language.

"Does translation work on WhatsApp, SMS, and Facebook — or only on web chat?"

Translation works on all channels: Web, WhatsApp, Twilio SMS, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, RCS, Twitter/X, and Email. The same account toggle covers every channel.

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How Language Is Detected

Velaro uses several signals to determine a visitor's language:

• Browser language — automatically read from the visitor's browser settings
• Website language — read from your website's language switcher (if your site has one, Velaro can pick up the language the visitor already selected)
• URL — detected from language codes in the page URL (e.g., /es/ or ?lang=fr)
• Visitor selection — visitor picks their preferred language from a list in the pre-chat survey
• Auto-detect — if no other signal is found, Velaro detects language from the visitor's first message

You can set the priority order in Account Settings → Chat Translations → Language Selection Mode.

If language cannot be determined, translation is skipped and the message is delivered as-is.

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Setting a Team's Default Visitor Language

When Chat Translations is enabled, a Default Visitor Language dropdown appears on each team's settings page. Go to Admin → Teams, select the team, and choose a language from the dropdown.

Use this when:

• You have teams dedicated to a specific language (Spanish team, French-Canadian team, etc.)
• You want consistent translation regardless of what the visitor's browser reports
• Visitors are routed to a language team via workflow rules, URL parameters, or survey response

When a team language is set, it overrides automatic detection for all conversations routed to that team.

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Setting Up a Language Preference Question in Pre-Chat Surveys

You can ask visitors which language they prefer directly in the pre-chat survey. Add a Language Preference question to any survey — this shows a styled language picker to the visitor before the chat starts.

Configuring the language list globally:

Go to Account Settings → Chat Translations → Language List to choose which languages appear in all surveys. The default includes English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Italian, and Dutch. Check or uncheck to customize, or use Select All.

Overriding per survey:

Open any survey in the Surveys page, add a Language Preference question, and use the question settings to pick a different language list for that survey.

Configuring the question text:

The default question is "What language do you prefer?" — you can change this in Account Settings → Chat Translations → Question Text, or override it per survey.

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Returning Visitors

When a visitor selects their language in the pre-chat survey, Velaro saves that preference in their browser. The next time they start a chat on your site, their language is automatically pre-selected. Visitors don't need to re-pick their language on every visit.

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How Agents Control Translation

Each agent can control translation in the conversation header:

• Off — show original messages, no translation
• Auto-translate — translate all messages (default when chat translation is on)
• Original + Translation — show both the original and translated text side by side

Agents can also change the detected visitor language directly if it was detected incorrectly.

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What Gets Shown in the Conversation

The conversation header shows how the visitor's language was determined:

• Customer preferred — visitor selected it in the pre-chat survey
• Browser detected — detected from visitor's browser settings
• Matched website language — picked up from your website's language switcher
• Detected from URL — found in the page URL
• Auto-detected — detected from the visitor's first message

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What Chat Translation Does NOT Do

Chat translation translates conversation messages between agents and visitors. It does not localize the messenger widget itself — the button labels, welcome text, placeholder text, and other UI chrome are controlled separately.

To change the language of the widget UI, go to Admin → Web Messenger → Language Configs and configure a Language Config for the locale you need. Language Configs and Chat Translations are independent — you can use either or both.

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Translation Caching

Velaro caches all translated messages. Each message is translated once and stored — when a conversation is reopened or another agent views it, translations load instantly with no additional API calls. Translations are only regenerated if the target language changes.

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Troubleshooting

Translation isn't happening:

Check that Chat Translations is toggled on in Account Settings → General. Also confirm the agent has a language preference set in their profile that differs from the visitor's language — if both are set to English, no translation occurs.

Wrong language detected:

The agent can manually change the visitor's language using the language selector in the conversation header. To prevent this happening frequently, adjust the Language Selection Mode in Account Settings to match how your website handles language (e.g., "website-first" if your site has a language switcher). Alternatively, set a Default Visitor Language on the team if visitors are routed to a dedicated language team.

Visitors aren't seeing a language selector:

Make sure you have added a Language Preference question to the pre-chat survey assigned to that deployment. The global language list must have at least two languages checked.