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
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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 supported in your Zendesk, the language preference is set to the closest match. For example, if you receive an email that contains Hungarian and that is not one of your supported languages, the nearest match, in this case German, 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
33 Comments
Hi! Why does this shows as a "Suggested Feature" on my Admin Overview page? Shouldn't this be turned on by default? Also, I checked some of my email tickets and none of them have this "Locale set" event.
Hey Suzana!
This is a feature that is enabled automatically on your account. But it is a good feature to know about. The feature changes the "Language" user field that you can find in the profile of the requester.
But Robert, there's no event added to the ticket as stated on the article. Is it still working? Also, does it work also on tickets created via API?
Suzana, if you are using Lotus, the event in Ticket would say "requester language".. and then fill in the appropriate language. This happens before the ticket is created, since the emails are preprocessed. Unlike API tickets, where tickets are created immediately.
Does the ticket event and detection error prompt still appear when locale is detected? I don't see this in the interface.
Hi @Robbert,
same question as above - Does the ticket event and detection error prompt still appear? Does this need to be activated?
Hi Zac/Martin/All!
The above-mentioned event log has actually been deprecated in the new UI. Apologies for the confusion and we will update this article to reflect these changes in the near future.
Any idea if this will work with Facebook/Twitter or any other channel integrations?
Hi Jeff.
Unfortunately, Facebook and Twitter do not currently detect a user's language.
Could we then set up a default language for specific Facebook pages? All tickets coming from our French Facebook page are set in English by default.
Hi Samuel,
On this page, check the section Managing Facebook tickets with business rules:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203661556-Setting-up-your-Facebook-channel
I recommend setting up a trigger that detects all tickets created via Facebook Posts and Private Messages, and sets the requester language to French. It would end up looking something like the attached image.
Thanks for the thorough response, Zac!
Thank you so much, Zac!
Play Store reviews can detect user's language and it appears in a sidebar. Any plans to use that data to change the language of Play Store review integration tickets?
Welcome to the Community, Ethan!
I just want to make sure I understand what you're asking...do you meant that the Play Store detects the user's language but when a ticket is created in Zendesk it's not in that user's language?
Can we use the detected language to suppress tickets? E.g. I only want tickets in English or French - NOT Russian. That would help us prevent some of these annoying Spam attacks that are caused and which can't be prevented because the Captcha doesn't work - the box won't stay checked off...
Hey, Karen!
If these tickets are being created through the widget/request form, then the language detection won't necessarily work in this case. Help Center language detection is set by detecting the browser language, and bots won't necessarily be reflecting their locale in this manner.
That being said, can you submit a request to support@zendesk.com regarding the Captcha box not staying checked? Spam detection is something we want to ensure works for you, so we look forward to assisting you with this!
I don't know if it is just me confused.
The article talks about this function. But it doesn't say where to enable automatic language detection function.
I set a trigger that zendesk will reply to every new email that we've received the email. But I hope the reply could match customer's language. Besides that, the automation would also match end user's language.
Hi Andy!
Thanks for your patience here!
As outlined above, as long as you have multiple languages set up, email detection will be automatic:
When you have more than one language enabled in your Zendesk, email-based language detection is automatically enabled.
The emails will be detected automatically, but you will need to ensure that you have language-specific triggers set up, or use liquid markup to serve translated versions of your messages:
Using Liquid markup to support multiple languages in automations, macros, and triggers
I hope this information helps you set this up!
This doesn't seem to be on in my ZD, since email tickets do not automatically detect the user's language, but we do have multiple languages supported. How do I turn this on manually for email tickets?
Hey Alan,
When you say this functionality is not working is the issue that the users language is not being set within their user profile?
Can you confirm you've setup these supported languages under Admin>Settings>Account>Localization as mentioned in our Adding multiple languages to Zendesk Support article. Once you've selected the appropriate languages you will then want to make sure you select the Save button at the bottom of the page.
Let me know if that doesn't resolve the issue for you.
Hi Brett,
Yes, those languages are supported, we use them for dynamic content on our macros and triggers/automations and it works just fine.
When we receive tickets via the online form languages are set up correctly from the start, but when we receive a ticket via email Zendesk does not recognize the "customer language" from the text, so that ticket field remains empty until we edit it manually.
Thanks.
Thanks for the additional information Alan!
I'm going to create a ticket on your behalf as our Support team will be able to assist further after receiving a few ticket examples.
You should receive an email shortly stating your ticket has been created so feel free to reply back to that with any examples you may have.
Cheers!
Hi all,
I'm trying to make Zendesk automaticly detect an end-user's language from an email but it does not work. Even thogh the end-user is writing in English Zendesk put's Swedish as the used language. Sometimes it detects Finnish but other times Zendesk selects English. I don't understand the logic. What changes could I make to make this automatic and correct?
Also, is it possible to change language for all end-users that already has contacted us but in one scoop? I know that it is possible to change manually but I would like to change for all of them at once if possible.
Thank you! :)
Hey Frida,
The auto-detection will only work for new end-users on the account. If the user has already been created and they generate a ticket in English, Zendesk will continue using the language set on their profile if it's Swedish.
If this is a brand new user who emails in English and the profile is set to Swedish, then there may be another issue at hand. Additionally, if you'd like to bulk update users, you'll need to utilize the APi.
Hope this helps!
Hi Brett,
Thank you for your answer!
Yes I have new users getting the wrong language. A Finnish-writing user gets Swedish language and so on. Do you know what might be the cause of this?
/Frida
Thanks for the update Frida!
I see you have a ticket created with our Customer Advocacy team so we will continue working with you there :)
Hi there,
We have been using this feature successfully for a long time but in the past week we started receiving a very high number of un-marked tickets. The language field is left blank.
When I check the events it is just empty beside 'Requester language':
Most of our customers contact us via a contact form we've linked to Zendesk which automatically fills in several ticket fields, but I think the problem above occurs when they contact our support email address directly.
We used to use the support email address exclusively before we set up the contact form and we didn't have this issue. If it couldn't detect the language it would often default to EN.
Any ideas why this might be happening now?
Thanks,
Eve
Hey Eve,
That doesn't look quite right! If you go to that user's profile, what is entered under the Language field for that user? Is it blank? My understanding is that it should default to your account language (EN for us).
When a user submits via the help centre, I believe it sets the language based on the locale of the help centre the form was submitted on. Ex: a form submitted from mysite.com/hc/fr/requests/new will be set to FR, but one submitted from mysite.com/hc/en/requests/new would be English.
You can check how the ticket was submitted by looking at the top of the ticket next to the requester email. if it says via yoursupportemail@company.com then you know it was via email.
Is the list of languages in the above article current? So I understand correctly that ZD does not detect Vietnamese?
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