Multilingual support without 30 native speakers.

The translation flow.

Customer writes in their language. Inbound is auto-translated to English (the agent's language). Agent replies in English. Outbound is auto-translated back. Full thread is preserved in both languages so anyone can audit.

Latency budget: under 1.2 seconds per message round-trip including translation. Above that, the conversation feels broken and customers bail.

Message template strategy.

• Author once in EnglishSOURCE OF TRUTH
• Translation on sendNOT PRE-TRANSLATED
• Pre-canned for top 80% topicsRESET PASSWORD · REFUND · SHIPPING
• Variables for personalizationNAME · ORDER · DATE
• Banned phrases listIDIOMS · SLANG THAT TRANSLATE BADLY

Escalation rules.

Sentiment-flagged messages route to a senior agent regardless of language. Translation can lose tone — humans can't.

Legal / compliance topics always escalate to a native speaker if available, or to a written response with a human-translated reply within 24 hours.

Confused customer signal — same question repeated, message length increasing — auto-escalates. Often the translation is misfiring on a domain term.

Quality controls.

Sample 1% of conversations weekly. Have a native speaker spot-check. Track "native quality" rate per language. Anything under 90% is a calibration problem — usually a domain term mistranslating consistently.

Maintain a per-language glossary of brand names, product names, and technical terms that should never be translated. This single fix typically lifts native-quality rate by 5–8%.