With the internet, borders have disappeared, making the market global and allowing businesses to think international from day one. English has become the one language most of the business ecosystem defaults to. Everyone's aware of it and tries to use it, more or less. That's why many companies have adopted a customer service strategy that offers English by default.

However, plenty of people from different countries aren't comfortable speaking English to get in touch with a company, especially when it comes to customer support. Encountering a problem, explaining an issue, or reading a knowledge base article in a language you don't fully master isn't easy. Building a multilingual customer support strategy is an effective way of actually reaching non-English-speaking customers.

The data backs this up clearly. CSA Research surveyed 8,709 consumers across 29 countries and found that 76% of online shoppers prefer to buy products with information available in their native language, and 40% say they will never buy from a website in another language at all. One of the critical assets in a multilingual strategy is the ability to support a multilingual knowledge base.

Now that the stakes are clear, let's talk about the real problems and real benefits of multilingual help articles, and how they can be supported inside a company.

Problems with a multilingual help center

Building a multilingual help center isn't for every company. A few problems are worth knowing before starting any development.

A multilingual help center requires native speakers

Building a multilingual knowledge base properly means having someone able to translate your articles accurately. It's best to keep this internal: an outside translator without product context can miss key details a native speaker on your own team would catch. If you're aiming for a genuinely good multilingual knowledge base, you'll likely also need agents who can speak that language when a written article isn't enough.

A multilingual help center multiplies the work

Say you have one knowledge base in French, and you're building 5 more in different languages. That's 6x the work for your team. A new feature ships? Six articles to write. An existing article needs an update? Six articles to update.

A multilingual help center requires the product itself to be translated too

What's the point of translating half the experience? If you're building a help center with dedicated articles in a language, you should also be translating the product itself. Otherwise, the disconnect between a translated help article and an English-only product interface is often exactly what drives the customer to contact support in the first place, the same problem you were trying to prevent. Start by translating the product or service itself to make the rest of the strategy actually work.

Benefits of a multilingual help center

Building a multilingual help center also comes with real, tangible benefits.

A multilingual knowledge base makes you more visible in key markets

By writing content in a customer's own language, you improve visibility in that specific market. This works best alongside a translated website, so the product is visible across the entire customer journey, not just at the support stage.

A multilingual knowledge base decreases the volume of requests you receive

By making help articles available in your customers' language, you let them be more autonomous. That means fewer painful, back-and-forth conversations for your team to handle.

A multilingual knowledge base makes your customers happier

As a French company, Crisp gets this question from French customers regularly: "You're a French company, why isn't the content in French?" It's a fair question, and the honest answer is scale: with hundreds of help articles, translating the full library into even one additional language is a real undertaking for a small team. But when a company does make that investment, customers notice, and they're happier for it.

Tools to build the best multilingual knowledge base

Tools exist to help companies do this more efficiently. Here are a few worth knowing about when building a multilingual knowledge base.

Weglot

Weglot is a dedicated translation tool that helps you translate your articles into more than 114 languages. It's fully automated, so the heavy lifting is handled for you, though you'll still want to review screenshots and visual content to make sure they match the translated text.

Crisp

Crisp is a multilingual customer support platform that includes the ability to build a multilingual knowledge base directly. It comes with a live-translate feature so agents can speak with each customer in their own language in real time, without needing a dedicated agent fluent in every language a customer base speaks.

Now that you understand what it takes to support a multilingual knowledge base, the next step is knowing what actually makes one good. Our complete guide to writing knowledge base articles that get used rounds out the picture: how to structure, write, and maintain articles once you've decided to build them, informed by looking at real knowledge bases across nine different companies.