Remember that closing scene in Finding Nemo, where the fish manage to get out to the sea in plastic bags and then ask themselves – now what?
This is exactly what happens often after folks translate their websites and forget they’re going to get contacts in 5 languages they don’t speak.
Free, hosted, multilingual support ticket system
ICanLocalize offers a free, hosted multilingual ready support ticket system, which you can easily integrate in any kind of website.
Want to see an example? Check out our own contact page.
It has the default fields (name, email, title and body) and CAPTCHA protection to prevent SPAM. And you can easily add your own fields to it for anything else you want to input.
It’s hosted, which means you don’t need to set up any database or install anything. You can create your own HTML, to match the look of your site, includes email notifications and is fully multilingual.
And yes, it’s free.
Handling messages in other languages
We’ll get back to the how-to stuff, for creating a support center for your site, but first let’s talk about what happens when you get messages that need translation.
Here is how it looks like (3 minute clip). We start by sending a message in Spanish, translating it using free instant machine translation and replying.
In case you missed it in the video, this is what happens:
- I went to our Spanish contact page and left a message.
- The contact form actually created a ticket. I received a confirmation email (in Spanish) and the admin (also me, with a different email) got a notification about the new ticket.
- Logged in as admin and used machine translation to translate the message to English. It translated fine, so I don’t need to ask for professional translation.
- I reply in English. For the demo, I didn’t have it translated, but the ticket system can do it for me.
- The visitor received an email with my reply and can add further messages to the ticket.
Setting up your own support center and creating contact forms
To create a contact form for your site, you’ll need to create a Support Center in ICanLocalize. Here is how:
- Create an account at ICanLocalize (or log in to your existing account).
- Click on the Support Center tab and create a new one.
- Add at least one department.
- Copy the HTML for the contact form and paste in your site’s contact page.
Translation options for messages in other languages
The support ticket sets knows in what language visitors leave messages in. When you get messages in different languages, you can have them professionally translated by ICanLocalize (0.07 USD / word), use free instant machine translation or not translate at all.
When you reply, you can reply directly in the visitor’s language or use professional translation by ICanLocalize. Of course, you can use free machine translation for your own replies, but we don’t recommend this option, as it will most likely produce translations which will not appear natural to your foreign visitors.
The language and translation preferences are made for each support department. To edit them, click on the department and edit its settings.
Language options for the support center