Update localization

All TalkJS UIs can be localized so that everything is displayed in the user's own language. You can specify a default language for all users, as well as set a language on user-by-user basis.

Set or update locale

Change the default language

The default UI language is American English (en-US). You can change the default language on the Settings page of your TalkJS dashboard.

Set a locale per user

If you need to support multiple languages at once, you can set the locale field per user. The locale field expects an IETF language tag.

Here's an example of how you can set the locale for a user, using the classic JavaScript SDK:

1session.currentUser.set({
2  name: 'Alice',
3  email: '[email protected]',
4  photoUrl: 'https://talkjs.com/images/avatar-1.jpg',
5  welcomeMessage: 'Hey there! How are you? :-)',
6  locale: 'nl-NL', // <-- that's the one!
7});

Here's an example of how you can set the locale for a user, using the REST API:

1PUT https://api.talkjs.com/v1/YOUR_APP_ID/users/12345
2

3{
4  "name": "Alice",
5  "email": ["[email protected]"],
6  "photoUrl": "https://talkjs.com/images/avatar-1.jpg",
7  "welcomeMessage": "Hey there! How are you? :-)",
8  "locale": "nl-NL"
9}

Right-to-left languages

If your app's reading direction is right-to-left and you use the dir attribute in your <html> tag (eg <html dir="rtl">), then TalkJS is automatically shown in right-to-left mode. Otherwise, set the dir option in ChatboxOptions and InboxOptions to "rtl" and everything will work as expected.

Additionally, TalkJS automatically defaults to a right-to-left layout when a right-to-left language is selected.

East-Asian languages

If your language is commonly entered using an on-screen keyboard for character selection, you might find that TalkJS's behavior to automatically send messages on "enter" conflicts with character selection. A pragmatic workaround for this is to set enterSendsMessage to false in createInbox's messageField option.

Available languages

Localization is currently available for the following languages:

  • Albanian (sq-AL)
  • Arabic (ar) (with right-to-left UI layout)
  • Bosnian (bs-BA)
  • Bulgarian (bg-BG)
  • Catalan (ES) (ca-ES)
  • Chinese (Simplified) (zh-CN)
  • Chinese (Traditional) (zh-TW)
  • Croatian (hr-HR)
  • Czech (cs-CZ)
  • Danish (da-DK)
  • Dutch (nl-NL)
  • English (U.S.) (en-US)
  • Estonian (et-EE)
  • Finnish (fi-FI)
  • French (fr-FR)
  • Georgian (ka-GE)
  • German (de-DE)
  • Greek (el-GR)
  • Hebrew (he-IL) (with right-to-left UI layout)
  • Hindi (hi-IN)
  • Hungarian (hu-HU)
  • Icelandic (is-IS)
  • Indonesian (id-ID)
  • Italian (it-IT)
  • Japanese (ja-JP)
  • Korean (ko-KR)
  • Norwegian (Bokmål) (nb-NO)
  • Persian (Farsi) (fa)
  • Polish (pl-PL)
  • Portuguese (Brazilian) (pt-BR)
  • Romanian (ro-RO)
  • Russian (ru-RU)
  • Serbian (sr-SP)
  • Spanish (es-ES)
  • Swedish (sv-SE)
  • Turkish (tr-TR)
  • Ukrainian (uk-UA)
  • Vietnamese (vi-VN)

Is the language you need missing from the list? Get in touch and a member of the TalkJS team will add it.