FAQ — Translation isn’t working
When an agent reports that translation isn’t happening, walk this list top to bottom.
1. Is auto-translation enabled at the tenant level?
Open Settings → Translation → General and check the Enable translation toggle. It has to be on for normal conversation messages to be translated according to agent language preferences.
This is the master switch. While it’s off, the per-agent toggle in step 2 isn’t even rendered on the agent’s own settings page — so if an agent tells you they can’t find it, check here first.
One exception: Atender may still localize certain system-generated or canned platform messages, such as handover or fallback confirmations, so customers see them in the channel or customer language. Don’t treat localized fallback text as proof that tenant-level auto-translation is enabled.
This requires admin access. If you’re not an admin, ask one to check.
2. Has the agent turned on their own primary-language toggle?
Open Personal Settings → Language and look for View and reply in your primary language.
This is a per-agent opt-in and it is off by default, which makes it the most common cause of “translation is enabled but I’m not getting it.”
Be precise about the symptom before you go further, because “translation isn’t working” means two different things here:
- With the toggle off, foreign-language messages are still translated — into English, for everyone. So an agent who reads the conversation in English is seeing translation working as designed. What they are not getting is their own language.
- With the toggle on, messages the agent doesn’t speak are translated into their primary language instead, and they can write replies in that language and send them in the customer’s language using the composer’s translate option.
If the agent’s complaint is “I see English, not Norwegian,” this toggle is the answer. If the complaint is “I see the customer’s raw wording untouched,” this toggle is not the answer — that’s step 1, 4 or 5.
The first time an agent opens a conversation, Atender may briefly show a Translating… indicator, because renditions are generated on demand the first time someone views the message. If the translated text appears after a moment, that’s expected.
3. Is the agent’s primary language still English?
Open Personal Settings → Language and check Primary Language.
Every account has a primary language — the field can’t be empty, and it defaults to English. So the failure mode isn’t a missing primary language; it’s a primary language nobody ever changed. An agent who turns on the toggle in step 2 while their primary language is still English gets English renditions, which is exactly what they were getting before, and it reads as “I enabled it and nothing happened.”
Set the primary language to the language the agent actually wants to read, then re-open the conversation.
Changing the primary language doesn’t rewrite renditions that already exist in the old language — the next conversation the agent opens is translated into the new one.
4. Is the source language one of the agent’s secondary languages?
Open Personal Settings → Language and check Secondary Languages — the field is described in-product as “languages you can read and write fluently.”
Messages in those languages pass through untranslated by design — that’s the whole point of listing them. If the agent set Norwegian as a secondary language and Norwegian customers come through untranslated, the system is working correctly. The agent’s primary language counts here too: a message already in the language you read is never translated.
If the agent doesn’t actually read the language they listed as secondary, remove it from the secondary list.
5. Did language detection get it wrong?
Atender auto-detects the source language. Mixed-language messages, short replies (“ok!”, “ty”), or messages that are mostly emoji can be detected wrong.
A translated customer message carries a toggle reading Original language: X • Show original. That label is the detected language — it’s the fastest way to confirm a misdetection. Click through to the original: if the original text is what you’d expect but the language named in the toggle is wrong, detection is the cause.
There’s no way to correct a detected language after the fact, and no in-product report for a misdetection — so if it happens consistently for a particular customer, note the conversation ID and the language the toggle claims, and escalate using the list below.
6. Is this a Knowledge Base article or a conversation message?
Auto-translation handles live conversation messages. KB articles use a separate translation system (translation jobs, protected terms, per-language overrides). If the article isn’t appearing in the customer’s language on your help center, the issue is on the KB side, not auto-translation.
Protected Terms are the one place the two meet: they live on the Protected Terms tab of Settings → Translation, and the Applies to card there switches them on per module — Knowledge Base, Conversations, Web Chat, Form Builder and CSAT. A protected term is deliberately left untranslated everywhere it’s switched on, so a single word or product name that “won’t translate” may be a protected term rather than a bug.
When to escalate
If all six items check out and translation still isn’t happening on a specific message, capture:
- The conversation ID
- The agent’s primary and secondary languages, and whether View and reply in your primary language is on
- The message that didn’t translate (or its ID)
- The detected source language, as named in the message’s Original language: X toggle
- What the agent saw instead: the customer’s raw wording, or an English rendition
Share that with your Atender support contact. Auto-translation issues are usually one of the six items above; the rare exceptions need data from a real example to diagnose.