Automatic translation of incoming messages
Whenever a customer sends a message in a language that is not listed as your agent language, Lokalise will automatically translate it and display the translated version in the comments:
Sending a translated reply
Type your response in the comments, starting with the exclamation sign (!) followed by the actual message, for example: !Hello, how are you doing?. Lokalise will translate this text into the conversation language and send it back to the customer:
Non-translatable markup
If you'd like to mark a portion of your message as non-translatable, wrap it with the *** characters. Any text enclosed into these characters will be ignored during the translation process. This feature is very useful to ensure that names, technical terms, or specific phrases are not altered during the translation process.
Here are some examples:
!Part of the text ***do not translate*** -> Teil des Textes do not translate
!Part of the text ****** -> Teil des Textes ****** // empty wrapper should not affect anything
!Part of the text ******* -> Teil des Textes ******* // consecutive * symbols in a row will be passed to MT without changes
!Part of the text ***examp***@email.com*** -> Teil des Textes examp***@email.com
Please make sure that the *** wrapper is applied after all text highlighting: bold, italic, etc. If possible, it's better to avoid text highlighting for parts of text that are not supposed to be translated.
Please note that this feature is applicable only to the messages sent by the agents. If you need to prevent certain portions of incoming (customer) messages from being translated, you can take advantage of the Exclusion rules feature.
Commands to configure Lokalise Messages
Lokalise Messages could be controlled with commands typed in the comments:
!info — shows the list of Lokalise Messages commands.
!lang code — change current conversation language (please find all the supported language codes in the following document). For example, to change the language to German, type !lang de.
!pause — pause translations for the current conversation.
!resume — resume previously paused translations in the current conversation. Only new messages will be translated.
!dashboard — get a one-time link to the Dashboard where you can configure non-translatable languages, add specific terminology to the glossary, and check the usage analytics.
Manually change the conversation language
Neural networks that we are using to perform machine translation sometimes fail to understand the language of the message (for example, if it contains typos or content in several languages).
To override chat language use the !lang chat command. !lang code — change the language of the current conversation (please find all the supported language codes in the following document). For example, to change the language to German type !lang de.
Known limitations
Lokalise Messages is currently unable to send translated responses to messages coming from Facebook Messenger.
Further steps
Learn how to configure languages: globally, on per-team, and on per-agent basis
Learn how to override language providers: globally or on per-language basis
Learn how to exclude messages from translation: fully or partially