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Multilingual setup

Mikabot handles English, Dutch, French, and German. Adding a language is not one switch — it touches four places, and skipping one is why 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 the fallback when nothing else applies.

Step 2: Set the starting language in the widget

Your embed snippet contains a language value:

window.MIKADO_CHATBOT_CONFIG = {
    "domain": "https://mikabot.studio-mikado.be",
    "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, leave the value at your primary language and make sure your pages carry a correct lang attribute on the <html> tag. Mikabot falls back to detecting the page language.

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 responses. Each response has a text field per active language, and a Translated marker showing which are filled in.

A missing translation falls back to English. That is a safety net, not a plan — a Dutch visitor receiving an English contact message will assume the shop is not Dutch.

Translate, in this order:

  1. Welcome message and attention popup
  2. Contact info and Frustrated user
  3. Product suggestion intros
  4. Error messages
  5. 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 language, 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 at all.

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 articles

AI responses explained

The difference between canned and smart responses, and how the bot decides which to use.

Site info and AI context

Fill in the fields that tell the AI who you are, what you sell, and how to sound.

Appearance and branding

Set the bot name, avatar, colour, and corner radius so the widget matches your store.

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