Use this article to set up your Help Center in multiple languages — including adding supported languages, setting a default, translating your collections and articles, and understanding how visitors experience language switching. Adding multiple languages requires the Advanced plan or higher and workspace admin access.
How it works
First, you define the languages to support in your Help Center, like English and French for example.
Then all your collections, sections, and articles will have the option to add a translated version for each language. The structure and organization of your Help Center is automatically applied to all languages, so it’s easy to manage, and easy for visitors to navigate, no matter which language they use.
Note: Though the Help Center can be configured to work in multiple languages, Articles themselves are not automatically translated.
All you need to provide are translated versions of your collection and section names, and your article content. We’ll automatically show the correct version to anyone who visits your Help Center (based on their browser’s language setting). Visitors to your Help Center can also switch between languages manually.
In Settings > Help Center > Collections, you’ll see all of your collections have a version for each language, which you can switch between when editing:
And all your articles also have a version for each language:
Notes:
If you have a supported language (e.g. French), and a French visitor lands on your Help Center, they’ll only see the articles that you have translated. They can switch to your default language to see any articles you haven’t translated.
The language switcher menu may display a language code instead of the full language name if a translation entry is missing.
If a visitor navigates directly to a Help Center URL in a language that isn’t in your supported languages list, they won’t be redirected to the default language — they’ll see an empty Help Center instead. This is different from browser language detection, which does fall back to the default. To avoid this, only add languages you’ve already published articles for.
Install Google Analytics on your Help Center to see which of your articles are viewed by speakers of the languages you want to support, and translate those articles first.
When you send articles to customers in Intercom Inbox, or share them with the Article inserter app, you choose which version of the article to use:
The Article Inserter app lets you share your articles in the Messenger home, Messages, Custom Bots, and more. Read this guide to find out how.
What languages does Articles support?
Articles currently supports 64 languages: Arabic, Bengali, Bosnian, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Canadian French, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Dutch (Belgium), English, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (Hong Kong), English (India), English (Ireland), English (Malaysia), English (New Zealand), English (Singapore), English (South Africa), English (UK), English (USA), Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, French (Belgium), French (Switzerland), German, German (Austria), German (Formal), Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Malay, Mongolian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Simplified Chinese, Slovenian, Spanish, Spanish (USA), Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish, Ukrainian, Uzbek, and Vietnamese.
Note: English, French, and German regional variants (e.g., English (UK), French (Belgium)) can be added as Fin and Help Center languages, but are not available as Workspace languages or AI Inbox translation languages. Use the base language (English, French, or German) for those settings.
Switching between similar language variants (e.g., German (Formal) to German) requires manual translation — articles in one locale won't automatically appear in another unless translated and published. Bulk actions to change languages are unavailable for public articles, so each article must be updated individually.
If you need to migrate from a generic language to a locale-specific variant (e.g., from English to English (US) and English (UK)), we recommend the following approach:
Add EN-US and EN-GB as supported languages in your Help Center settings.
Copy the content from your existing English (en) articles to create EN-US and EN-GB versions.
Set EN-US (or your primary locale) as the default language.
Remove the generic English (en) language only after all content has been migrated and published in the new locales.
Note: The Help Center supports right-to-left (RTL) scripts, including Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian. No setup is required — RTL formatting applies automatically when you publish an article in a supported language.
RTL articles appear left-to-right in the editor but display correctly once published.
Configure your Help Center to support multiple languages
Follow these steps to add languages to your Help Center:
Go to Settings > Help Center > Configure & Style, open the General tab, and select Supported languages.
Choose your default language — this should be the language your existing articles are written in. Save. Intercom automatically deselects the previous default, and your existing articles are linked to the new default language.
Click + Add language for each additional language you want to support. This option is found under the General tab in Supported languages.
Go to Styling > Header and select each language to set the page title and header text for that language.
Note: Multi-language Help Center configuration requires the Advanced plan or higher. Customers on the Essential plan are limited to English as the default language and cannot add additional languages or switch to a non-English default (such as Spanish). To configure your Help Center in a language other than English, you’ll need to upgrade your plan.
Notes:
It’s not supported to change the logo in the Help Center header separately for each language. The Help Center only supports uploading a single logo, which will appear in the header across all supported languages.
You will not be able to delete languages in the Help Center settings if the Supported Languages in your Messenger settings is set to "All." First, set it to the specific languages you want to support, and then you should be able to delete them in the Help Center language settings.
If any of your supported languages are missing a page title you will see an error message saying "Make sure that you fill in the title for all languages."
Organize your Help Center in all languages with translated collections
To ensure the best experience for visitors to your Help Center you should add a translated name for every collection and section. Then people can browse your Help Center to find the info they need, in any language you support.
To do this, go to Settings > Help Center > Collections, and switch to the language you’d like to add translations for.
If you don’t translate the name of the collection, it won’t appear on the home page of your Help Center. Each collection must also contain at least one translated article to be visible in your Help Center.
On any collections without a translation you’ll see "Add a name" and the collection status will be "Needs a title".
Collection names and descriptions appear in Google search results, so use terms your customers are likely to search for.
After translating the collection, you should also add a translated version of any sub-collections.
Sub-collections without a translation won’t appear in your Help Center, but the articles in that collection will, if they have been translated.
You can reorder your collections and sections from any language view, and this order will apply across all languages.
Translate your articles into multiple languages
Now that your Help Center supports multiple languages, you'll need to add translated versions of your articles. Read this guide to learn how. To set or change an article's language, open the article in the editor and use the language selector at the top of the page to choose the desired locale. Each language version must be published separately — until published, translated versions are in draft and won't appear in your Help Center for that language.
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