Selling to customers abroad: AI translation in chat

AI translation lets you answer customers in a language you don’t speak — but it’s only safe on routine questions: stock, price, delivery, payment. Anything where the exact wording carries legal or emotional weight stays with a person who knows the language.

That isn’t a limitation of the technology, it’s how you distribute risk. A mistranslation of «delivery» costs a clarifying message. A mistranslation of «warranty» costs an argument.

What is safe to translate automatically?

Questions whose answer is a fact from your catalogue:

1. 1

   Stock and sizes

   Catalogue data, unambiguous. A translation error is obvious immediately and easy to correct.

2. 2

   Price and payment methods

   Numbers and payment-provider names barely distort.

3. 3

   Delivery time and cost

   Numbers plus a courier name. Minimal risk.

4. 4

   Order status

   Short factual updates — the ideal candidate for automatic translation.

Where does automatic translation get dangerous?

Where the wording matters more than the gist. Complaints, refunds, warranty obligations, anything about health and safety. Translation can preserve meaning and destroy tone — and in a conflict thread, tone is the meaning.

The second danger zone is conditional promises. «We’ll refund you if the item doesn’t fit» easily becomes an unconditional guarantee you never offered after a round trip through two languages.

How do you configure translation so brand tone survives?

With one move: give the assistant examples. Three to five of your real replies, labelled «this is how we speak», do more than any description of tone in words.

Then set three things explicitly:

1. Formality level per language. A German customer expects «Sie»; a Polish one usually expects formality too; an English-speaking one expects plain language without officialese. One setting across all languages guarantees someone is uncomfortable.
2. What not to translate. Brand name, model names, SKUs. An assistant that helpfully translated a product name has made it unfindable.
3. Units and currency. Sizes, weight, price — in the system the customer actually uses.

Where to start if foreign enquiries are still occasional?

Not with configuring the assistant, but with an inventory of questions. Collect the 10–15 messages that actually arrived and see how many are that same trio: stock, price, delivery. It’s almost always the majority.

Which means all you need to start is translated templates for those questions plus the rule «everything else goes to a human». Full multilingual automation earns its keep when foreign threads become daily rather than occasional.

Checking translation quality without speaking the language

Use back-translation: ask the assistant to translate its own reply back into your language and compare it to the original. Discrepancies in numbers, conditions and certainty («might» became «guaranteed») show up instantly — and that’s exactly where the dangerous errors live.