Question
What are some of the key features of Google Translate on Chat?
Answer
Admins can choose to enable or disable auto translations for their accounts. Once enabled, when an end user clicks to start a new chat, Zendesk checks the first word and string of text. If Chat detects a language that is different than what is configured in your personal settings in the Chat dashboard, a small pop-up appears to indicate that the end user is typing in a different language. This will also present agents with two options: Translate or close.
The close option removes that pop-up for Google Translate. The Translate option translates the end-user's response for the answering agent and any subsequent messages from the Chat agent for the end user.
For agents, next to the end-user's translated message, there's an option to show the original untranslated text, and next to the agent's message, there's an option to show how their message was translated.
End users aren't notified that their messages are translated, but they see both the agent's original untranslated responses and a translated version, labeled as translated in their native language.
Additional things to note:
- At the end of the chat, when a ticket is created, none of the end-user message translations appear in the transcript. Translations are only overlaid by Google Translate for the duration of the chat.
- Both the original and translated messages sent by the agent appear in the transcript.
- If the Google Translate feature does not automatically detect the language that an end user is typing in, agents can manually activate the feature to translate the chat by clicking the Actions drop-down button in the upper right-hand corner of the chat window.
- Agents can change the translated language at any time using the Google Translate menu at the top of the chat.
- Google Translate does not automatically translate to the customer's language the messages from agent to end users when an agent initiates a chat from the dashboard.
- Google Translate may not detect the end-user's language for one-word chats. For example, if you send a message that says "hola," Google Translate doesn't match on
Español. - There is a 5000-character limit on translation. Anything above that will not end up being translated due to Google’s implementation of the service.