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There are several ways to detect and set a user's language. One of those ways is automatically detecting an end user's language from an email message sent to Zendesk Support. Automatic detection works only for requests from unregistered (new) users and users who do not currently have a language setting selected.
Email-based language detection is useful if you provide support via email only since your users don't use help center, never sign in, and aren't able to set a language preference. The only other way to handle language for email-only end users is to have them send email support requests to a language-specific email address such as german@support.myaccount.com.
This article contains the following sections:
How it works
Email-based language detection is automatically enabled when you have more than one language in your Zendesk account.
- If a language is declared in the Accept-Language email header, that language is set for the user.
- If there isn't a language declared in the header, an email text scan attempts to detect the language. The length of the email message can affect the language analysis. There's no guaranteed length at which the language will always be detected, but longer messages produce better results.
- If the text scan can't detect the language (for example, the message was too short to determine the language), no language is detected.
- If the detected language is one of your supported languages, then the user's language preference is set.
- If a language can't be detected by analyzing the email text or header, then the user's language is set to the Zendesk account's default language.
Supported languages
The email language detection feature currently supports the following languages:
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Greek
- Hebrew
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
25 comments
Kristie Sweeney
1
Dave Marshall
Thanks Kristie! Was it just Greek that was missing from the list?
0
Kristie Sweeney
1
Dave Marshall
Hi there,
I've been doing some testing with emails sent in different languages. Was pleasantly surprised to see that Greek was correctly detected. Could the list of supported languages be updated?
0
Cedric
paporretearia desarbolando, Tornquist Greteke66@gmail.com redobleguemos rebujarais esclavizase añedirian calcularan sermoneasen atontolinaron pugnasen.
0
Hannah Ehrlich
Ah, I got it! Thank you. I'll start off by automating "Is english" and "is not english," and then move from there.
0
Dan Ross
Hey Hannah,
In Zendesk Explore, try using the Attribute for 'User Locale' in conjunction with a metric for counting the number of Tickets. That should break down the languages for you by the # tickets created attached to that requester's language.
If you have requesters who submit in multiple languages, I would suggest creating a trigger for each support language that sets a value in a custom drop down field for Ticket Language. This way you get an accurate count going forward of the ticket language, even if the requester's locale settings change.
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Hannah Ehrlich
Hi all,
Just looking to clarify how identifying user language works. I would like to report to our execs a breakdown of languages we get tickets in. So, ideally, I need Zendesk to tell me that out of these 80 tickets, 10 are in English, 5 are in Spanish, etc, etc. However, if sounds like right now, however, all the language identification is done on the user side. So the best I could do is say "We got 50 new users who submitted tickets, 10 spoke English, 10 spoke Spanish, etc."
My understanding after reading all these help articles is to do so I have to manually create an automation for every language I want to identify. So if I think we get tickets in ten languages, I have to create 10 automations, and if we get tickets in a new language, I have to identify that we're getting those tickets and then create a new automation for that language.
Is that correct?
0
Gavin
That's our experience as well, Christy. Unfortunately this is considered normal by ZD.
We use the Organizations feature to organize customer accounts by language/region, and then we route by Organization. However it required working with our Engineering team to accomplish matching the account to the appropriate Org.
0
Christy
Hi team,
I've tested with traditional Chinese content email (With English subject) and the user language wasn't able to detected as in Chinese. Please kindly advise.
0
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