If your customers are not all reading the same language, your chat widget already handles most of that for you. It speaks 38 languages, visitors can switch with one click, and it remembers what they chose. There is exactly one part that stays your job — and it is the part people are surprised by, so it is worth two minutes now.
The 38 languages
The widget's interface is available in English, German (Deutsch), French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文, Simplified), Portuguese (Português), Italian (Italiano), Dutch (Nederlands), Japanese (日本語), Hindi (हिन्दी), Swedish (Svenska), Danish (Dansk), Hungarian (Magyar), Polish (Polski), Czech (Čeština), Finnish (Suomi), Russian (Русский), Turkish (Türkçe), Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), Norwegian (Norsk, Bokmål), Slovak (Slovenčina), Croatian (Hrvatski), Bulgarian (Български), Korean (한국어), Thai (ไทย), Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt), Romanian (Română), Greek (Ελληνικά), Ukrainian (Українська), Malay (Bahasa Melayu), Filipino, Estonian (Eesti), Irish (Gaeilge), Latvian (Latviešu), Lithuanian (Lietuvių), Maltese (Malti), Slovenian (Slovenščina) and Serbian (Srpski, Latin script).
Visitors switch languages with the globe button at the top of the widget's home screen, next to the close button. The list shows each language written in that language, and picking one changes the whole widget straight away — no reload, and an open conversation is not lost.
Their choice is remembered, both in their browser and on their visitor record, so it survives a reload and is still there the next time they come back.
The one thing that surprises people
Two different kinds of text live inside your widget, and they behave differently:
- Yaplet's own wording — the tab names, the buttons, the system lines, the reply-time promise, the sentence before a visitor is handed to a person, and everything your AI writes. This follows the visitor's language on its own. You do nothing.
- Text you typed yourself — your greeting, your welcome line, your home-card titles and descriptions, your quick-reply buttons. This stays in the language you wrote it in until you add the other languages yourself.
So a Spanish visitor to an English site sees Spanish tabs, Spanish buttons and a Spanish AI — but your own hand-written greeting still says "Hi there 👋" until you translate it. That is not a bug, and it is not something Yaplet can guess: only you know how your sentence should sound in Spanish.
If you never wrote a custom greeting at all, there is nothing to do — Yaplet's default greeting is already translated into all 38 languages.
Translating your own text
The rule, in one sentence: your language on the page; the other languages behind the globe.
Every field in the widget designer that holds visitor-facing text is a normal box you type into, in your own language — your greeting, your welcome line, your card titles. Next to each one sits a globe. That is where the other 37 languages live, with your own wording shown at the top as the reference the translations have to match.
- Open Brand → (your brand) → Chat widget and find the text you want — the greeting and welcome line are on the Home tab.
- Type your version straight into the box, and press Save Changes like any other setting.
- Click the globe next to it: a window opens with the other languages. Type them yourself, or press Translate the empty ones and let Yaplet write them for you. It is free, it does not use your AI credits, and an Undo button appears immediately if you do not like the result.
If you have changed the text but not saved it, the globe saves the page for you first, then opens — otherwise you would be translating the old wording. This is the page's normal save, so anything else you have changed is saved too.
Quick buttons written by Redesign with AI or by AI setup are translated into every other language for you as soon as they are saved.
Leaving a box empty is a decision, not a gap
An empty box means every visitor reads Yaplet's own wording for that field, in their own language — already translated, nothing for you to do. That is the greyed-out text you see in the box, so you can always tell what you are choosing between.
What a visitor actually reads
- Their own language, if you wrote it.
- Otherwise your text, exactly as you typed it.
- Otherwise Yaplet's own wording in their language — which only applies while you have written nothing of your own for that field.
So a German visitor to a shop that writes in Hungarian reads the Hungarian greeting until somebody writes the German one. Never some third language that happened to be filled in first.
Translating uses AI credits
Every Translate button runs a real AI call, and it is billed like any other AI usage — from your credit balance, or against your subscription. This changed: widget translation used to be free for everyone. An organisation with no subscription and no credits is now refused with "AI generation needs credits. Top up your balance in Billing to keep generating."
Writing and saving your own wording is always free, and any field you leave empty still shows Yaplet's own wording in the visitor's language at no cost. Only translating your text draws on credits.
Translate all languages is the cheapest way to do a full pass — it handles each text across every language in one go, rather than one language at a time.
Seeing where you stand: the Languages tab
The last tab of your chat widget is Languages, and it answers what the individual fields cannot: which languages are finished, and what is left.
- A line at the top: Your texts are written in English (14 texts).
- Translate all languages — fills in every missing translation in every language at once, and redoes the outdated ones the AI wrote.
- One row per language: 12 of 14 · 3 by AI · 2 may be outdated, with Translate and Review.
Review opens one language full-screen with every text and your own wording above each box — the way to read a language through before you trust it.
To see a language the way a visitor will, pick it with the globe inside the live preview beside the settings — your unsaved changes included.
The same summary appears as one small line above the first field on the Home tab, because that is where you are standing when you write something.
"May be outdated"
When you change one of your texts, the translations that were made from the older version are marked may be outdated. Nothing is deleted and nothing is rewritten behind your back — it is a note that those languages are still saying the previous version. On the Languages tab, Translate and Translate all languages redo only the outdated translations the AI wrote: one a person typed is never overwritten there and keeps its note, and these buttons have no Undo. Re-translate the outdated ones, in Review, redoes all of them, hand-written ones included, and gives you an Undo.
Conversation starters work the same way: their own wording is the label and prompt on the starters page (Brand → (your brand) → Vex → Starters), the globe on each row holds the other languages, and editing its label or prompt flags its translations — pausing or reordering it does not.
Choosing which language visitors start in
A visitor who has never picked a language gets the first answer Yaplet finds, in this order: their own earlier pick, then anything your website asked for, then their browser's language, then your brand's language.
Two switches control that, on the Languages tab of your chat widget:
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Follow the visitor's browser language | Off | Opens the widget in the visitor's own browser language when it is one of the 38. |
| Language selector | Visible | Whether the globe button appears at all. Turn it off to lock the widget to one language. |
Your brand's language — the fallback everyone else gets — is set at Brand → Brand settings → General → Language.
If you change your brand's language later, your texts stay filed under the old one: the Home tab's fields show what is stored for the new language, and the Languages tab warns you while none of your Home texts are in it yet. To clear the warning, write your texts in the new language on the Home tab (they are translated into the other languages from there), or change the brand language back in Brand settings. No button moves the old texts across.
If you have visitors abroad, turning on Follow the visitor's browser language is the single most useful change here. They never have to notice a language switcher: the widget is simply already in their language.
What deliberately stays in one language
- Messages already sent. Switching language does not rewrite what your AI or your team already said — that would be rewriting history.
- Your knowledge base and documentation articles. Each one carries its own language, and your AI answers from whichever ones fit.
- Your team's replies. Your agents write what they write.
Texts Yaplet writes for you
There is nothing to type for these — Yaplet says them in each visitor's own language:
- The tab names and the rating question.
- The handoff line a visitor reads before being connected to a person. A workflow's Request agent step can send a message of its own instead.
- The reply time — you choose it from eleven set options on the Messages tab, and every visitor reads it in their own language.
Next, if you have not set your widget up yet: Configure your widget for the first time.