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.

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, and more).

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

How Language Is Detected

Velaro uses several signals to determine a visitor's language. You can control which signal takes priority:

• 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 your visitor already selected on your site)
• 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.

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. A tip on the question will link back to Account Settings if you want to change the global default instead.

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.

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 in the survey. Visitors don't need to re-pick their language on every visit.

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.

Agent Language Preference

Each agent sets their preferred language in Profile → Basic Information → Language. This is the language agent messages are translated into for the visitor, and the language visitor messages are translated into for the agent.

Admins can set this on behalf of agents from User Management → Edit User → Language. To set the same language for an entire team, go to Teams → [Team Name] → Set Translation Language.

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

This helps agents understand why translation is active and what language the visitor is expected to use.

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.

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).

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.