Globalizing your Drift deployment to support multiple languages allows you to fully control the experience that your visitors have with Drift to ensure it is fully translated into their language.

Multi-Language widget's are available for customers on the FY22 Premium plan and above.

In this article we'll go over:

• What Multi-Language Widgets Control
• Targeting your language widgets
• Activating Multi-Language Widget
• Configuring Multi-Language Widgets
• Examples and Warnings

What Multi-Language Widgets Control

Multi-Language Widget controls the text content of your skills and the widget’s surrounding text, for example, the widget will control the language that automated prompts such as Meeting Booking, Article Lookup, and Ticket Creation along with the text surrounding the playbook. 

As an example of this, we’ll translate the look of the meeting booking flow.




Additionally, text like the placeholder text for the widget will be translated.



(Exampling above the translation of “Respond to” into “Responder a” for the Spanish translation)

Note: When editing a playbook, skills like Book a Meeting, Article Lookup, and Create a Ticket have hard-coded content that appear in English in the playbook builder, however, they will be translated into the language they should be if a visitor matches the targeting criteria for the widget respective to the desired language.

Targeting Your Language Widgets

You have two targeting options for setting up multi-language widgets Automatic and Manual targeting, below we’ll break down their differences.

Automatic Targeting:
With automatic targeting we will target based on the URL the visitor is currently on, we do this by looking for the longest possible match for a given URL. As an example of this, if you target “website.com/de/” we’ll show the widget that has the longest URL match to this URL.

Keeping this in mind, if you have URLs that begin with the language’s letters, you’ll want to include those URLs in the widget you would like them shown. For example, if you have the page “website.com/developers” and have a German widget targeting “website.com/de” you will want to add the “website.com/developers” URL to your English widget so that English has the longest possible URL match with that URL.

Manual Targeting:
Manual targeting is in line with how you commonly install and deploy Drift where we’ll provide you a specific Javascript Code for each widget and your development team will need to install that specific code on the pages where that widget should show in the desired language. This is recommended if your website does not translate based on URL (i.e., does not have specific URLs for translated pages).

Activating Multi-Language Widget

It is important to keep in mind that even when the visibility of a widget is turned off or set to “No Visitors,” the widget may still translate if the automatic/manual targeting conditions are met. This means it is best to plan the deployment of your translated playbooks alongside the deployment of your multi-language widget release.

A process for doing this would be leaving the widget in manual targeting until you activate your playbooks then either requesting the website development team rolls out the multi-language widget code if you’re opting for manual targeting or switching to automatic targeting and inputting your desired URLs for automatic targeting. Doing this will then activate the automatic translation that will begin to run in the background.

Configuring Multi-Language Widgets

Note: Setting up a multi-language widget is only available to those with the admin role or specific custom permissions to access widget controls.  Want to watch instead of reading the steps below?  Check out this video from the Drift Customer Success team.

1. In your settings you’ll add a new widget for the language you would like to set up translation. Consider the widget visibility settings, most commonly, users will align these with the visibility settings of your default widget.  
2. If you’d like to test the widget’s translation you may add the manual targeting code that will be provided to you onto a staging web page.
3. You’ll then want to align the targeting of your translated playbooks to the way your widget will be targeted to ensure they are well aligned, this can be done through URL-based targeting if you’re using the automatic targeting option.
4. Once your translated playbooks are live, you can install the widget code onto the desired pages if you’re using manual targeting or switch the widget to automatic targeting and add in the URLs you would like to align that language’s widget to in the widget targeting settings.

Examples and Warnings

Scenario: Translating to German

If I would like to target the German audience through using automatic targeting on pages that have “/de” in the URL, however, I have paged like “/developers” and “/demorequest” on my website, I would want to follow the following process to ensure a successful deployment.

1. Add the English URLs that begin with “/de…” to my English Language widget’s automatic targeting
   1. Adding: “website.com/developers” and “website.com/demorequest”
   2. This will ensure that the English URL has the longest possible URL match to those URLs
2. Deploy My German-translated playbooks using targeting conditions that align to how the widget is targeted
   1. Adding: URL does contain “/de”
   2. Adding: URL does not contain “/developers” or “/demorequest”
   3. This will target the playbook in alignment with the targeting of the language widgets
3. Add the German URL string for targeting to the German Language widget’s automatic targeting.
   1. Adding “website.com/de”
   2. Once done, the German widget is now active and will begin targeting those webpages with a German-translated widget experience.

Warnings

1. If you do not turn your playbooks off or change targeting conditions, they will start working or firing immediately. It is not essential to go through the above cutover steps. Ex: If a company has an English widget on company.de today and a playbook that targets their .de sites, they can swap out the English widget snippet for the German one, and the playbook would work.
2. Widget visibility does not control if translation if active; the widget may be showing to no visitors, however, if the automatic or manual targeting conditions are matched the translation to that desired language will still occur.
3. Fallback messages are not translated and will be sent in English. To get around this, we recommend creating a new non-English routing rule that applies to the users and type out a fallback message in your desired language.