Languages

Zubby replies in the shopper’s language by default. No setup is required: the AI follows the language the shopper writes in, and the widget interface is translated into 25 locales.

Detection order

For the first reply, Zubby resolves the response language from three sources, in order of trust:

Saved shopper preference - a locale already stored on the shopper’s profile from earlier visits. The strongest signal.
Storefront page language - the lang attribute on your theme’s <html> element. Multilingual Shopify and WooCommerce themes set this per market, so the widget follows your storefront’s active locale.
Accept-Language header - the browser’s preference, used as the fallback (quality-weighted, so a shopper with fr;q=0.9, en;q=0.8 gets French).

After that, the conversation itself wins: if the shopper writes in a different language mid-chat, the AI mirrors them for the rest of the conversation. Product names, SKUs and verbatim source quotes may stay in their original language. Review important translations with a fluent speaker.

Widget interface locales

The widget interface (buttons, placeholders, lead-capture forms) is translated into 25 locales: 24 languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese counted separately) plus Brazilian Portuguese as a regional variant, which currently shows the Portuguese widget strings:

English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Urdu, Indonesian, Vietnamese, and Thai.

AI replies are not limited to this list. The AI answers in the language the shopper writes in, including languages outside it; reply quality in a given language depends on the underlying AI model. For a language outside the list, only the widget’s buttons and labels and the AI’s opening line fall back to English.

RTL languages

Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu render the widget with right-to-left layout automatically. No configuration needed.

How multilingual chat works with your catalog

Your catalog is indexed in its source language (typically English). When a shopper asks in another language, the AI translates the request into an English search query, retrieves against the catalog, and writes the reply in the shopper’s language. Product titles, SKUs, and verbatim policy quotes stay in their original language - so an Urdu shopper asking for “a bag for a wedding” gets real products from your English catalog, pitched to them in Urdu.

Email language

Recovery emails are written in the shopper’s detected language too - the generation prompt asks for natural native phrasing in that language, not a word-for-word translation, matching the same language the live chat agent used with them.

Brand voice applies in every language

Your brand voice and persona carry across locales: the tone profile, custom instructions, and blocked phrases shape replies in Japanese the same way they do in English. If a translation reads off, review the conversation transcript in the dashboard and tighten your custom instructions.

Example: an Arabic shopper and an English catalog

A shopper asks in Arabic whether the “Trail Jacket” is waterproof. The reply can be in Arabic while keeping the product name unchanged. Verify that the answer cites an approved waterproof rating. If the source only says water-resistant, the answer must preserve that limit. Test non-English catalog sources separately; interface translation does not prove retrieval or answer accuracy.