Running a website chat in languages your team does not read

Answering in another language is the easy half. The hard half is everything around it: what your team does with an enquiry nobody in the office can read, which script a name arrives in, and whether "1.500" means one and a half or fifteen hundred. This guide is about the half nobody plans for.

Start with what is actually true today

An Allinaa assistant answers in the languages configured for the business: three on Standard, with American English as the default primary, and all supported languages - 108 today - on Premium. The visitor's language is detected from what they write, so nobody has to find a flag menu. See choosing your languages and answering in several languages.

The real problem: an enquiry your team cannot read

This is the failure that catches businesses by surprise. The assistant answers a customer in Persian perfectly well, the enquiry lands in the inbox in Persian, and nobody in the office can tell whether it is urgent. Three things make that workable:

• The request summary is structured, so the name, contact method and what they wanted are readable as fields even when the sentences are not.
• A visitor message can be shown in your team's language in the cabinet, so you can see what was asked.
• A reply your team writes in its own language can be sent in the customer's, with both versions shown before it goes and an undo if it reads wrong.

Decide which language your team works in before you launch in a market, not after the first enquiry arrives.

Formality is where tone goes wrong invisibly

Many languages distinguish a formal and an informal "you", and the choice is not stylistic - it is the difference between respectful and presumptuous. German, French, Spanish, Russian, Japanese and Korean all carry this, and an English speaker reviewing the text cannot see the mistake. If a language matters commercially, have one person who speaks it read your knowledge once. That single hour prevents the error no amount of testing in English will find. See writing the way your chatbot should speak.

Scripts, direction and names

Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and Pashto read right to left, so a chat must lay out correctly in both directions. Names arrive in the visitor's own script, which is correct and which your team should not "fix" - and your own systems need to accept them, because a CRM field that rejects non-Latin characters will lose you the contact. Search is the related trap: a case-insensitive search that only folds ASCII will not match a name in Greek or Turkish, which is why Allinaa's inquiry search folds Unicode properly.

Numbers, dates and the mistakes that cost money

These are small and expensive:

• Decimal separators. "1.500" is one and a half in English and fifteen hundred in German or Spanish. Never let a price be typed into a chat in an ambiguous form and then transcribed.
• Dates. 03/04 is two different days depending on where the reader lives. Write months in words in your knowledge.
• Phone numbers. Ask for the country code. A local-format number from another country cannot be dialled.
• Addresses. Field order, postcode position and whether a house number comes first all differ. Take the address as one block of text rather than as five fields.

Time zones, and the thing the assistant does not know

A business sets its own time zone, and your opening hours are answered from your knowledge. What the assistant cannot do is work out what time it is anywhere - it has no clock - so it cannot say "we are open now" or "that is 3 a.m. for you". If you serve several time zones, write your hours with the zone named, and expect to state your response target in working days rather than hours. See what a chatbot cannot do.

What to translate, and what not to

Translate the facts customers ask about: services, what is included, areas, hours, how to buy, your boundaries. Do not translate your marketing adjectives - they rarely survive - and do not translate prices without deciding the currency question first, because a figure in the wrong currency is worse than no figure. Keep product names, brand names and legal names in their original form; that is also what Allinaa's own site does, and its language checker enforces it.

A sensible order for entering one market

1. Pick one language, not five. Choose it from where your enquiries already come from.
2. Write the knowledge in English first, then have it translated, then have one native speaker read it.
3. Decide who on your team handles those enquiries and in which language they will work.
4. Launch, then read the questions the assistant could not answer in that language - they are different from the English ones.
5. Only then add the next language.

See measuring the results and the launch checklist.