Inline Translations

If you have a percentage of your employee population who speak a language other than your company’s default language, inline translations are a great way to ensure everyone receives the information posted within your app. This feature promotes workplace diversity and great company culture.

What Are Inline Translations?

Beekeeper uses Google Cloud Translation to provide an approximate translation of all chat messages and stream posts, comments, forms and tasks whenever the user’s device language (phone or tablet) or browser's language (computer) is different from the language being used in a post or a comment.

Google Cloud Translation provides one of the most established translation services and is capable of administering translations in the following languages:

How do Inline Translations work?

Once enabled, the inline translation feature will recognize the user’s device language settings.
Note: These are the mobile phone settings or desktop browser language settings, not the Beekeeper app language settings. Google Cloud Translation produces an approximate translation in the device’s selected language.

In streams:
A user will see “See translation” link for any post or comment written in a language other than the user’s device language.

When the user clicks on the “See translation” link, they will see a translated version of the post/comment below the original message.

In chats and tasks:
A user must click the three dots menu below the original message or task written in a language other than the user’s device language. Then, they will see a box with options. One of them is "Translate".

When the user clicks on the “Translate” button, they will see a translated version of the original text. The translation will replace the original text. This action can also be reversed by choosing the three dots menu again and clicking "Show original" option. Here is how it looks on mobile for chats. 

Here is how it looks on mobile for tasks.

In forms:
A user must click the three dots menu in a form written in a language other than the user’s device language. Then, they will see a box with the option "Translate". When the user clicks on the “Translate” button, they will see a translated version of the original text. The translation will replace the original text. This action can also be reversed by choosing the three dots menu again and clicking the "Show original" option. Here is the manual for mobile devices.

Why does "See Translation" not appear for every post/message?

The Inline Translations feature is driven by Google Cloud Translation which has a confidence level per post/comment that must be met in order to provide a translation. If the confidence is high enough to meet the Beekeeper threshold (0.97), then the platform will accept the translation in the detected language from Google and provide "See Translation". If Google is unable to confidently identify the language, "See Translation" will not show up at all. This confidence level is driven by the character threshold (text length) and specific language. For example, the threshold is as low as one character for Chinese, as it is quite clear what language it is. Romance languages require more words to differentiate and as a result, the threshold is much higher. For Spanish, it is recommended that posts/comments have at least 16 characters to ensure the content is translated because Spanish is so similar to other languages.