When your product reaches an international audience, it’s only a matter of time before you start receiving support requests in French, Spanish, German, and beyond.
Sure, your team could rely on Google Translate – manually copying and pasting messages back and forth – but that approach isn’t exactly efficient. Plus, it raises concerns about data privacy, accuracy, and overall workflow consistency.
That’s why most modern help desk platforms, including Zendesk, offer translation tools – whether through built-in features or third-party apps – to handle multilingual support.
From translating tickets and replies to localizing help center content, these tools are essential for global customer service teams.
In this article, we’ll explore Zendesk's translation options, including native features for multilingual service, top-rated Zendesk translation apps, and tips for choosing the best fit for your team.
What Is a Zendesk Translation App?
A Zendesk translation app is an add-on you can integrate into your Zendesk environment to streamline multilingual support operations and boost agent productivity.
These apps use machine translation to translate customer inquiries, agent responses, and other content in real-time.
The primary use case for Zendesk translation apps is enabling your team to help customers in languages they don’t speak fluently.
There are also apps that make it easy to translate help center content into any language supported by Zendesk with just a few clicks. Instead of manually exporting articles, sending them to human translators, and re-importing the translated copies back for each language you want to support.
Does Zendesk Have a Translation Feature?
Before diving into the best translation apps, let’s first explore Zendesk’s native translation features.
Depending on your needs, these built-in tools might be sufficient and help you avoid overcomplicating your tech stack with unnecessary apps.
Chat translation
Chat translation is crucial for live interactions, where speed is key to delivering a great customer experience.
With Zendesk’s Google Translate integration, when a customer starts a chat in a language different from the language configured in the agent’s personal settings, a notification will pop up and allow the agent to translate customer messages and their replies in real time during the chat session.
It’s worth noting that translations are only overlaid for the duration of the chat. When the conversation is saved as a ticket, the transcript includes the customer’s original messages and the agent’s original and translated responses – the customer’s translated messages are not included.
Keep in mind that Google Translate may struggle with accuracy, especially when dealing with complex sentences or industry-specific terminology.
Live ticket translation
Zendesk provides translation support for live conversations in the Zendesk Agent Workspace for chat and social media tickets.
When enabled, this feature lets agents view translated customer messages and send replies automatically translated back into the customer’s language (as long as it’s supported by Zendesk).
This feature uses Amazon Translate (not Google Translate), and for clarity, replies sent to customers are labeled as (translated) in the customer language – to set expectations, as machine translations may not always be perfect.
The above mentioned label can play a huge role and help maintain trust and understanding when there is an error in the translated text.
Amazon Translate, while supporting fewer languages, generally offers higher-quality translations compared to Google Translate.
It works better with custom terminology and adapts to the target language’s structure instead of mimicking English sentence patterns - which is especially useful when translating into complex languages like French or Russian.
Dynamic content for macros
For teams that rely heavily on macros, Zendesk’s dynamic content feature can help save time and reduce errors.
Instead of having agents manually translate macro text every time, you can translate your macros once and use dynamic content to automatically adjust the macro text based on the customer’s language.
Note: Rich formatting isn’t currently supported for dynamic content, which can be limiting in certain cases – for example, when you need to highlight an important notice or include a hyperlink with custom anchor text.
When Should You Consider a Dedicated Zendesk Translation App?
So, if Zendesk already offers built-in translation features, why would you need a dedicated add-on? Great question!
Here are a few reasons why a specialized translation app might be a better fit for your needs:
Zendesk doesn’t provide native translation for email tickets, which remains a cornerstone for many businesses and customers. And switching between Google Translate and Zendesk for every email isn’t very efficient for your agents.
There is a 5,000-character limit per message, and any message over 5,000 characters will not be translated. For long customer inquiries – like detailed security questionnaires or API calls troubleshooting with lengthy request bodies – this limitation will become a bottleneck.
Google Translate, which powers Zendesk’s chat translations, may not always detect the language in one-word or short messages. For example, a simple “hola” does not register as Spanish. And let’s be honest – neither Google nor Amazon Translate are top-tier solutions for customer service. Tools like DeepL and solutions powered by conversational AI are proving to be much more effective for multilingual support these days.
Zendesk’s native translation doesn’t support a glossary, which allows you to customize how certain terms are translated. This feature is critical for businesses in industries like SaaS, where specific terms or product names need to remain untranslated or follow a specific format. For instance, a SaaS company might need the product feature name “Quick Sync” or the business name itself to stay consistent across all languages instead of being translated into local equivalents, preserving the brand identity and reducing confusion for users.
If you’re handling only a handful of tickets in, say, German each month, Zendesk’s native features might be sufficient.
But if you’re scaling globally, managing high volumes of tickets in multiple languages, and don’t have the resources to staff a multilingual team yet, investing in a dedicated Zendesk translation app can offer a better experience for both your agents and your customers.
Yes, it’s an added cost and effort. Still, it’s a far more practical and scalable solution than hiring agents fluent in every language your customers speak – especially if resources are tight.
Plus, offering support in your customers’ native language can directly benefit your business: research shows that over 70% of customers are more likely to purchase products and services offered in their native language.
What Are the Key Features to Look for in Zendesk Translation Apps?
When selecting the right translation app for your Zendesk environment, keep these key features in mind:
Personalization
Many Zendesk translation apps let you add a glossary to control how certain terms are translated.
For example, you can ensure that your brand name, product name, or key phrases remain unchanged or are translated in a specific way. This helps maintain consistency and preserves your brand voice across all languages.
Translation sources
While Zendesk relies on default options like Amazon Translate and Google Translate, many third-party apps offer superior alternatives.
Look for apps that leverage conversational AI translations to deliver more accurate and nuanced results.
Omnichannel support
Zendesk doesn’t natively support email ticket translation, so be sure to choose an app that covers all the communication channels your team uses, including email, chat, social media, and others.
Reporting
Look for apps that provide detailed reports, ideally allowing you to track new and recurring languages, the number of translated requests, and trends in language usage.
These insights can help you optimize operations, for example, by bringing in human agents that can support recurring languages.
Formatting
Losing formatting after translation can be a major frustration (trust me, I’ve been there). Choose a translation app that retains text formatting (bold, italics, or hyperlinks) in the translated content.
This small feature can save your team a ton of time formatting their replies after translation.
Security
When bringing on a new tool that has access to your customer data, security should be a top priority. Verify what data the app will access, how it’s stored, and how it’s protected.
Running those details by your security team before committing to them is a great idea to ensure compliance.
Best Zendesk Translation Apps
Zendesk marketplace offers many translation apps for Zendesk tickets and help center content, but let’s focus on the best options that have top ratings that you can choose from for various translation needs as you navigate your support operations in Zendesk.
Translate Conversations by Swifteq
Translate Conversations by Swifteq is a Zendesk ticket translation app that enables your support agents to communicate with customers in their native language.
Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, it provides fast and accurate translations of customer messages and team replies to and from any spoken language.
Here’s how it works:
Once installed, the app appears in the Ticket Sidebar within open tickets.
When new tickets arrive in a language other than your team’s preferred language, they’re automatically translated.
Agents then write responses in their own language and click the Translate Conversations button in the Reply panel. The reply is then instantly translated into the customer’s language before being sent.
Standout features of the Translate Conversations app by Swifteq include:
Custom glossary to control how specific terms are translated, ensuring that important phrases (like your brand name or key terms) remain consistent across languages.
Internal notes with the original reply to provide full context for your team.
Automatically applied tags on tickets with translated content – to track and categorize multilingual interactions.
Reporting options allow you to track the total number of translations, inbound translations (customer messages), and outbound translations (agent replies).
This translation app for Zendesk tickets is consistently praised for its user-friendly interface and the great support experience it offers, which enables users to provide fast and accurate multilingual service.
Pricing: Free for up to 100 translations per month. For unlimited translations, pricing starts at $7 per agent per month.
Since Zendesk doesn’t currently offer native features for automatic help center translations, using an add-on is your best solution.
This is especially true if you want to provide self-service content targeting international customers but have limited resources. That makes it difficult to engage a translation agency for every piece of content – or if you’d simply prefer to avoid the manual process of importing and exporting translated copies.
The Help Center Translate app by Swifteq simplifies this process by allowing you to translate articles, sections, categories, or even entire help centers in just a few clicks. It eliminates hours (and sometimes days or even weeks) of manual work and ensures consistency across languages.
The translation is powered by ChatGPT, and users typically report that minimal proofreading is needed when native speakers review the results.
Particularly if you use a custom glossary and fine-tune the translation prompt to align with your brand voice and tone.
Here’s how it works:
Add a custom glossary terminology to ensure company, product, and feature names are translated accurately – or left unchanged. You can also tweak the ChatGPT prompt to better match your brand’s style.
Choose the help center content you want to translate – whether it’s individual articles or an entire category. You can handle translations one at a time or in bulk.
Decide where the translated content should go. With one click, the tool translates and pushes the content to its destination while preserving the original HTML formatting.
You can save translations as drafts for quality checks before publishing. It will still save time, as proofreading AI-generated translations is far quicker than starting from scratch with human translators.
Users of the Help Center Translate app highlight its ability to streamline multilingual content creation. It’s an ideal solution for teams looking to expand their self-service options across languages without the high costs or logistical headaches of traditional translation methods.
Pricing: Starts from $69 per month with 200 articles included.
Translation by Lingpad
Lingpad’s Translation app is a versatile solution for supporting tickets and help center localization. One standout feature of Lingpad is that it allows adding your brand context, enabling more accurate and context-aware translations.
Here’s how it works:
When a customer sends a message, the translation is automatically added as an internal note.
Agents draft a reply in English, use the Lingpad widget to translate it, and send the translated version to the customer.
They can preview the translation before sending it, and the original draft is logged as an internal note for future reference.
Lingpad’s app also supports help center localization at an added cost:
Once the app is activated, you can select the articles you want to translate and choose the status for the translated copies – Translated or Approved.
Translated but not approved articles require review and approval before exporting, and Lingpad offers the option to hire professional human reviewers to verify AI translations for an extra cost.
Once approved, translated articles can be exported into Zendesk as drafts. From there, you can manually publish the drafts in Zendesk.
Lingpad is ISO 27001 certified and complies with GDPR regulations, making it a great fit for industries handling sensitive customer data or companies with stricter compliance requirements.
Pricing: The pay-as-you-go model is based on the number of words translated, with packages starting at $175 for translation credits, plus a fixed monthly fee that starts at $32/month.
Stylo Scribe
Stylo Scribe is primarily an AI content generation app, but it also includes features for automatic help article translation. It relies on ChatGPT to generate articles based on ticket comments and translate those articles into different languages.
Generating articles from ticket comments is most helpful for startups that haven’t yet developed a robust help center:
If you’ve answered common customer questions through support tickets, Stylo Scribe can use those comments to generate help articles, which can then be translated into the languages your customers need.
And you can adjust the tone and style and add word and phrase blacklists to filter out unwanted language.
If you’re looking for a hybrid solution for content creation and translation, Stylo Scribe would be a great fit.
However, if you’re only looking for a translation tool and already have help center content, Stylo Scribe’s price of $15 per agent per month may not be the most cost-effective option compared to more focused translation solutions.
Pricing: $15 per agent per month to create and translate articles.
Don’t get lost in translation
No matter the size of your business, offering multilingual support is essential for expanding into new markets and connecting with customers around the globe.
What once required a fully staffed, multilingual team can now be achieved with AI-powered translation apps. By adding dedicated translation apps to your Zendesk environment, you can deliver a seamless native-language experience for customers while empowering your support agents to work efficiently across multiple languages.
Take Swifteq’s Translate Conversations and Help Center Translate apps – both integrate effortlessly with Zendesk, allowing you to roll out multilingual support in just minutes.
Ready to take your business global? Get started with a free demo today.
Maryna Paryvai
Maryna is a results-driven CX executive passionate about efficient and human-centric customer support. She firmly believes that exceptional customer experiences lie at the heart of every successful business.