Set your language preferences
Language preferences are per-agent. Each person on your team picks the language they work in, the languages they read natively, whether conversations and replies should use their primary language, and an interface-language preference.
Before you start
- Auto-translation enabled at the tenant level (needs the AI settings permission — see Enable auto-translation). Until it is on, the View and reply in your primary language toggle is not shown at all.
Steps
- Open Settings → Language.
- Set the four fields:
- User Interface Language — The language you want menus, buttons, and system text to appear in. — Records your interface-language preference. Note that the agent app’s own text ships in English today; the one place this setting takes effect is the AI conversation-history summary, which can be generated in this language instead of the customer’s. It doesn’t change how messages are translated.
- Primary Language — The language you prefer to work in for customer conversations. — Identifies your preferred working language. When View and reply in your primary language is on, inbound messages get translated into this and your replies are composed in this before being translated out.
- View and reply in your primary language — Turn this on if you want conversation messages and the reply composer to use your primary language instead of default English. — Opts you in to working in your primary language. When off, Atender defaults to English for translated conversation views and reply composition. This toggle is only shown when your tenant has translation enabled.
- Secondary Languages — Languages you read natively and don’t want translated. — Messages in these languages come through as the customer wrote them.
- Click Save changes.
Verify it worked
- Refresh a conversation. A message you know is in a language other than your primary or secondary should now appear translated, with a toggle to see the original.
- A message in your primary language should appear unchanged (no translation needed).
- A message in one of your secondary languages should appear unchanged (you’re trusted to read it).
- If View and reply in your primary language is on, the conversation view should use your primary language instead of default English.
- Under the reply composer, look for the line reading Replying in
— translate to . Its checkbox is what actually translates the reply on send; the customer’s language next to it is a link you can click to correct the conversation’s language.
Picking a primary language well
Your primary language should be the language you’re most comfortable working in. It’s where:
- Translated inbound messages land when View and reply in your primary language is on
- Your composed replies start before being translated out
If you toggle between two languages day to day, pick one as primary and add the other as secondary so messages in the secondary language pass through untranslated.
Adding multiple secondary languages
You can list as many secondary languages as you read natively — the picker imposes no cap. Each one disables translation for messages arriving in that language; secondary languages just mean “don’t translate this for me.”
When the system gets it wrong
Atender detects the source language automatically. If a customer’s message is mixed-language or very short, detection can land on the wrong language. When that happens:
- Toggle to view the original on the message
- Correct the conversation’s language: under the reply composer, click the language name next to the translate-reply checkbox and pick the right one from the list
Setting the language by hand pins it. Automatic detection will not overwrite a manually chosen conversation language afterwards, however many messages arrive.