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How do I change or set the language in the widget on my website?

Matteo Genesio Stara
  • Edited
Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Question

How do I manually set the language of my Web Widget (Classic)?

Answer

The widget language is set automatically by default based on the customer's browser. To manually set the language of the widget instead, follow the directions below for the widget you have on your account.

Tip: To determine which widget you have with your Zendesk account, see the article: Which widget do I have with my Zendesk account?

If you use the Web Widget (Classic) with a Support account

To customize the Web Widget (Classic) so that it always appears in a specific language regardless of your customer's browser language, use the setLocale command as in the example below.

<script type="text/javascript">
 zE('webWidget', 'setLocale', 'LANGUAGE_CODE');
</script>

For more information, see the developer documentation for the setLocale settings. For a complete set of instructions, see the article: Advanced customization of the Web Widget (Classic).

Note: When no help center articles match the widget's locale, the widget will attempt to match the search results in the default language of the help center first. For example, when the language of the widget is set to Dutch, and the help center does not contain any Dutch content. If the default language of the help center is English, the widget tries to match results in English. If there are no results, the search extends to the articles that do not have an English translation to match the keywords used across all the help center languages.

Chat-only Web Widget (Classic) account

To set the language for a Chat-only Web Widget (Classic), you will need to use custom code. See this guide in our developer portal for more information: Changing the widget language for chat-only accounts.

Legacy chat account

If you have a Legacy chat and would like to set the widget language, see the article: (Legacy Chat) Setting the language of the legacy Chat widget.

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7 Comments

  • Francois Spinnael

    How can we force the webwidget to look only in 1 language ? 

    Because this remark says that it looks into all the languages if I understand it correctly... But in zendesk guide we can't give different tags/labels for different languages... 

    Note: Setting the language via API does not extend to the Help Center search within the widget. The search matches the keywords used across all the Help Center languages. For example, the language of the widget is set to Dutch but the Helpcenter does not contain any Dutch content. The widget tries to match results in a different language supported, for example French, and serves French results instead.

     

    What we want is forcing the WebWidget to look into the helpcenter language that we have choice. What is the solution for that? (Because it seems that zendesk is only doing it for some languages and that a huge blocking factor)

     

    0
  • Shai Sy Dimayuga
    Zendesk Customer Care

    Hi Francois S,

    A ticket has been created on your behalf and someone from our Support Team will contact you back regarding this via email.

    Cheers!

    0
  • Dale Gordon

    Hi! I need a way to set the locale of the web widget on launch, so that it loads with the correct locale from the beginning. At the moment it loads in English only to be changed after that. It would be very helpful if that could be set from initialization.

    Also, please open another ticket to allow the manual setting of mobile mode. We have a use case where the user can select either desktop or tablet mode and we wish for the support widget to follow suit.

    0
  • Dale Gordon

    Shai Sy Dimayuga

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    Hi Dale,

    You can customize the widget so that it always appears in a specific language using the setLocale command. This command sets the language for only the widget and doesn't override your host page’s language.
    0
  • Dale Gordon
    • Edited

    Hi Dane. Thanks for getting back to me.

    I can get it to setLocale after initialization. I was meaning setting in on load. So that it immediately starts in the correct language.

    Another thing I would like feedback on is overriding when it is in mobile mode. I feel that would be a great addition! 🎉

    Regards,
    Dale

    0
  • Dane
    Zendesk Engineering
    Hi Dale, 

    Unfortunately, only setLocale is available for the widget. The feature setLanguage was available only for Legacy Chat. But thank you for the feedback we'll definitely have a look into it. 
    0

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