Understanding conversation translation


You can give your agents the power to automatically translate messages from live conversation channels in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, if they so choose. This allows agents to communicate with end users and other agents, even if they are using different languages. This article describes how live conversation translation works. To activate conversation translations, seeTurning on and off AI translations for ticket conversations.


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You can give your agents the power to automatically translate messages from live
conversation channels in the Zendesk Agent Workspace, if they so choose. This allows
agents to communicate with end users and other agents, even if they are using different
languages. This article describes how live conversation translation works. To activate
conversation translations, see Turning on and off AI translations for ticket
conversations.
For information about using conversation translation after it is activated, see Translating conversations in the Zendesk Agent
Workspace.
This article includes the following topics:


About conversation translation
How conversations are translated
The end-user experience
Translation limitations




About conversation translation

Conversation translation gives agents the option to automatically translate
incoming messages (coming from the end user) and outgoing messages (going to the end
user) in the Zendesk Agent Workspace. It works in conversations from the following
channels:


Live chat
Social channels
Sunshine Conversations channel
Zendesk messaging
Comments sent via other channels, such as email, web form, or API


If the agent’s and end user’s languages differ, a translation banner is
displayed informing the agent of the language difference, and they can choose to
enable translation for that conversation.
The following video gives you an overview of how conversation translation works:




How conversations are translated

Zendesk uses Amazon Translate for live messages that
require quick responses, such as chat, Zendesk messaging or social channels, and
Amazon's Nova Micro for the other
channels, such as email, web form, or API.
An end user’s language is determined based on recent messages they have sent, then
our translation services are used to translate text. The length and number of the
messages can affect the language analysis. There's no guaranteed length at which the
language will always be detected, but longer messages produce better results.
For agents, the translation for outgoing messages works based on the language set in
the agent’s Support user profile. For the most accurate results, the language of the
text the agent types should match that profile language. For example, if an agent’s
profile language is set to English, the message should be written in English before
it is translated into the end user's language. If the agent enters text in a
different language than the one configured in their profile, translations may be
inaccurate or behave unexpectedly.
If the text scan detects that the agent’s and end user’s languages are different, the
translation banner is displayed. If the text scan can't detect the language (for
example, the message was too short to determine the language), the banner doesn’t
appear.

If you don't see the translation banner, click the ticket options menu, then click
Translate.

Both the original and translated messages sent by the agent appear in the Event log.
End-user messages appear only in the original language.



The end-user experience



When an agent turns on automatic translation for a conversation,
the end user does not receive an activation notification—agent messages
simply appear in their detected language. However, translated agent messages
are identified in the conversation.
In a live chat,
translated messages have a Show original link, which end users can click
to display the untranslated message:
In messaging and Social Messaging conversations, translated
messages are identified by the word Translated in their detected
language. Unlike live chat conversations, however, they cannot display the
untranslated version of the message:






Translation limitations

Translation limitations include:


There is a 5,000-character limit per message for translation. Any message
over 5,000 characters will not be translated.

SunCo Shorthands are not supported for
translations.
Translations for third-party widgets are not supported.
Our translation service cannot accurately translate texts written in a
phonetic manner. For example, translation will only work for Hindi text in
Devanagari script but won't work when it is written in Roman script.
Translations will work with a subset of use cases for all incoming and
outgoing email triggers.
Rich text in the message might be lost or tweaked during translations.
If the translation fails when an agent sends an outgoing email, the email
will still be sent in the original language after five minutes.
Messages containing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or sensitive
data are not translated due to data protection and content filtering
restrictions.




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