As described in Setting and detecting a user's language, there are several ways to detect and set an end-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.
The exact behavior of automatic language detection depends on the channel that the end-user used to submit the ticket (for example, email vs. non-email tickets).
This article contains the following sections:
How it works
-
If the detected language is one of your supported languages (set in the Localization tab of the Account page) then the user's language preference is set.
- If the detected language is not enabled in your account, the language preference is set to the closest matched language enabled in your account. For example, you receive an email that contains Hungarian and that is not one of your enabled languages, but German is enabled. In this case, German, as the nearest match is set as the user's language.
Email-based language detection is especially 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.
When you have more than one language enabled in your Zendesk, email-based language detection is automatically enabled.
Supported languages
The email language detection feature currently supports the following languages:
- Arabic
- Chinese
- Danish
- Dutch
- English
- Finnish
- French
- German
- Hebrew
- Italian
- Japanese
- Korean
- Norwegian
- Polish
- Portuguese
- Russian
- Spanish
- Swedish
- Thai
38 Comments
Also how much of a language must be present for the language detection to trigger one way or the other? We get a lot of tickets in a mix of English and another language. If the ticket contains even a little bit of Russian (for example) and mostly English, we want to detect the language preference as Russian.
What's the tipping point for the detection?
Hi Gavin,
I talked to our team about this and there are going to be different factors at play depending on the individual tickets. In this case we'd recommend sending specific examples to our support team if you need to go over some of the tickets in more depth. However if most of the email content is in English it is more likely that the auto-detection would classify it as English.
I hope zendesk can detect more languages like Greek Korean etc. We will set the trigger to assign groups according to the user's language
Hello-
We would like to create one or more reports which show the original detected language prior to it being set to one of our supported languages, such that we can gauge activity levels and plan resources. Does Zendesk store the original detected language in a way that is accessible to us?
Thanks- Paul
Hey Paul McCabe
It's not stored as an attribute except for the Requester Language, however it's not a field that tracks history.
I'd look into a trigger that adds a tag of some kind ex: 'original_eng' when a ticket is Created and Requester Language = English.
That way, even if you change the Requester Language attribute later in the ticket's lifecycle, you'll still have the original language as a tag for reporting later.
Let us know how you progress!
Thank you. I do understand your suggestion, however, if ZENDESK is changing the language as part of it's detection algorithm on inbound, then can we ever see what the original value was?
Ah, I misunderstood. I don't think that's something that would be surfaced in a reportable manner. I'd definitely upvote that idea if you posted it as a feature request in the product feedback section of the community, I can see that being useful data to see!
Will do- thank you!
Please sign in to leave a comment.