Most small business websites are written in one language, on the quiet assumption that every customer thinks in it. Plenty of people who get by in English every day would still rather describe a damp problem or a sore back in Polish, Urdu or Portuguese.
Nobody complains about this gap, which is why it goes unnoticed. An enquiry written in Polish lands at 8pm, waits until someone pastes it into a translation tool the next morning, and by the time a careful reply goes out the customer has booked a firm that answered the night before. Others never write at all.
A multilingual AI receptionist changes the first half of that story. The second half, what your team does with the enquiry, is still yours to sort out.
How it works when your content is in one language
You do not need a Portuguese knowledge base to serve a Portuguese-speaking visitor. A website assistant like SpideyChat is taught from your content in whatever language you wrote it, then replies in the language the visitor writes in. It reads the question, finds the relevant parts of your English content, and answers in Portuguese.
That is genuinely useful, and it is also where the care is needed. Every answer is effectively a translation of your content, produced on the spot. For opening hours and parking, that is low risk. For a tenancy clause or a dosage instruction, it is not.
What translates well and what needs watching
| Type of content | Usually fine | Needs checking |
|---|---|---|
| Opening hours, location, parking | Yes | Date formats, e.g. 06/07 read as June or July |
| General service descriptions | Yes | Industry jargon with no direct equivalent |
| Prices | Mostly | Currency, VAT wording, "from" prices losing their conditions |
| Service and product names | Depends | Names that get translated when they should stay as brand terms |
| Policies, contracts, cancellation terms | Rarely safe alone | Legal meaning can shift with a single word |
| Health, safety or legal information | Information only | Must still point to a qualified person; never treat as advice |
The pattern is simple. Plain facts survive translation. Conditions, exceptions and anything with legal weight are where a sentence can come out grammatically perfect and slightly wrong.
For the risky rows, write your content so the important condition cannot be lost. "Cancellations less than 48 hours before the appointment are charged in full" survives translation far better than "late cancellations may incur a fee".
What a good exchange looks like
Here is a visitor writing in Spanish to a physiotherapy clinic, with an English gloss in brackets for this article:
Visitor: Hola, ¿tratáis dolor lumbar? ¿Cuánto cuesta la primera sesión? (Hi, do you treat lower back pain? How much is the first session?)
Assistant: Hola. Sí, tratamos el dolor lumbar. La primera consulta cuesta 65 £ y dura 45 minutos. Esto es información general y no sustituye una valoración profesional. ¿Quiere que el equipo le contacte para concertar una cita? (Hello. Yes, we treat lower back pain. The first consultation costs £65 and lasts 45 minutes. This is general information and does not replace a professional assessment. Would you like the team to contact you to arrange an appointment?)
Visitor: Sí. Hablo un poco de inglés, pero prefiero español. (Yes. I speak a little English but prefer Spanish.)
Assistant: Entendido. Le pediré sus datos y anotaré que prefiere español. (Understood. I'll take your details and note that you prefer Spanish.)
Two details matter. The price kept its currency and its duration, which is exactly the kind of fact that drifts. And the visitor's language preference got recorded, which gives your team a fighting chance at the follow-up.
Checks to run before you rely on it
- List your real languages. Look at past enquiries, reviews and the area you serve. Pick the two or three languages that actually turn up, not every language that might.
- Find a fluent tester for each. A member of staff, a friend, a regular customer happy to help. Machine back-translation is not a substitute for someone who reads the language natively.
- Give them real questions. Take ten genuine past enquiries, have the tester ask them in their own words, and read every reply.
- Check the numbers first. Prices, dates, times, distances and phone numbers. These should come back identical to your English content.
- Check the conditions second. Cancellation terms, eligibility, service areas. Ask the tester whether a customer would come away with the right idea.
- Ask a question you have no content for. The assistant should say it does not have that information and offer to take details, in the visitor's language.
- Rewrite the content that failed. Usually it is an ambiguous English sentence, not a translation problem.
Repeat the check after big content changes. Updating a price list in English updates every language at once, which is convenient until a new ambiguity slips in.
The follow-up is where multilingual plans fall over
The assistant can hold a fluent conversation at midnight. Your office at 9am may not be able to.
Decide these things before launch:
- Who replies. If someone on the team speaks the language, route those leads to them. A webhook can send a lead into Slack or your CRM with the conversation attached, and you can filter from there.
- Which language you reply in. Replying in English to a Polish enquiry is not ideal, but it is honest. Replying in careful machine-translated Polish is fine for scheduling, less fine for anything contractual.
- What live takeover means. If a team member on duty takes over a conversation in a language they do not read, they will struggle. It may be better to capture the enquiry and reply by email.
- What you promise. Do not tell visitors "we speak Arabic" unless a person on your team does.
Where to start this week
Pull your last three months of enquiries and count how many were written in, or mentioned, another language. If the number is zero, this is not your priority. If it is more than a handful, pick the most common language and run the seven checks above with a fluent tester.
Then fix the ambiguous English sentences the test exposes, because they are confusing your English-speaking visitors too. The demo lets you try a conversation in another language straight away, the glossary explains grounding if the term is new, and testing with real past enquiries shows how to build the question set your tester will use.