Live chat translation
Live chat translation lets your operators and customers understand each other even when they don't share a language. When a human operator is handling a conversation, incoming customer messages are shown to the operator in the operator's own language, and the operator's replies are delivered to the customer in the customer's language — automatically, in both directions.
The customer always sees their own language, and the original wording is never lost: operators can use Show original on any translated message to read exactly what was sent.
How it's different from the AI's replies
When Chatonio's AI is answering a conversation, it already detects the customer's language and replies in it — that's built in and needs no setup. Live chat translation is for the moment a human operator takes over: it lets that operator read and write in their own language while the customer keeps chatting in theirs.
Turning it on
Live chat translation uses two switches — one for the workspace, one for each operator:
- Project admin — open your project settings and turn on Live chat translation. You can optionally choose a fixed set of languages to pre-translate every message into; leave it empty to translate on demand, only for the operators who are actually handling each chat (the more economical default).
- Each operator — in Settings → Profile, turn on Auto-translate customer messages and pick the language you'd like to read and write in. An operator who leaves this off simply sees the original messages, untranslated.
Which channels it covers
Live translation works on the channels a human operator handles directly: the web chat widget, Telegram (1:1), the helpdesk portal, and email. It supports around 30 languages, including English, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
What it costs
Each translated message is billed the same way as the rest of Chatonio's AI — by usage, from your project's prepaid balance. There is no separate subscription and no plan requirement: live chat translation is available on every plan, and you only pay for the messages that are actually translated.