Multilingual setup

The widget recognises six languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Spanish, and Italian.

Mikabot’s built-in texts — the default AI responses and chatbot messages — exist in English, Dutch, French, and German. Spanish and Italian can be activated and the bot will answer in them, but you write every response text for those languages yourself.

Adding a language touches four places, and skipping one is the usual reason a bot answers in the wrong language.

Step 1: Activate the languages

1. Go to Settings → Site info
2. Open Website Languages
3. Select every language your website serves
4. Save

The first language you select acts as the primary one. It is the default for previews and for the language value in your embed snippet.

Step 2: Set the starting language in the widget

Your embed snippet contains a language value:

window.MIKADO_CHATBOT_CONFIG = {
    "domain": "https://app.mikabot.chat",
    "store_id": "st_your_chatbot_key",
    "language": "nl"
};

If your site has one URL per language, set the matching value in each language’s template. That is the most reliable setup.

If you cannot vary the snippet per language, the widget falls back to the lang attribute on your <html> tag, then to the visitor’s browser language, then to English. Both the config value and the lang attribute must be a bare two-letter code — nl, not nl-BE, which is not matched.

Whatever the starting language, the bot follows the visitor: writing in French gets a French reply.

Step 3: Translate your responses

Go to Settings → AI smart responses. Each response has a text field per active language.

On the English field there is a Translate this text to the other languages button that fills the rest for you. Read the result before saving.

A missing translation falls back to English.

Translate, in this order:

1. Welcome message and attention popup
2. Contact info and Frustrated user
3. Product suggestion intros
4. Everything else

Step 4: Import products per language

Product data is stored per language, and each product feed is bound to one language.

1. Go to Ecommerce → Product feeds
2. Add one feed per language
3. Pick the correct Language for each

The Products in DB counter is shown per feed, so you can see at a glance whether a language is missing its catalog. A visitor writing in French with no French products gets no product suggestions.

If your shop only publishes product data in one language, the bot can still chat in the others — it just suggests products described in the language you have.

See Connect a product feed.

Step 5: Verify

For every active language:

1. Set Settings → Appearance → Test Language to that language, or open the Demo page
2. Ask a product question and check the reply language
3. Ask for a human and check that the contact message is translated
4. Confirm product cards show titles in the right language

Watch the results

Dashboard → Language Distribution shows which languages visitors actually use. If a language you activated barely appears, either your traffic does not need it, or your widget always starts in the wrong one.

Related

• Install the widget
• AI responses explained