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