A five-star review lands on your Google profile, written in Portuguese. You don't speak a word of it. Do you reply in English and hope they read it anyway, paste it into a translation app and copy back whatever comes out, or skip it because replying in a language you don't understand feels riskier than staying quiet? None of those are good defaults. Here's a straightforward way to handle a review written in a language other than your own, without gambling on a bad translation.
Why the language you reply in matters
The language you choose signals whether you actually read the review or pasted a stock line under it. A reply in the reviewer's own language, even a short one, reads as a business that pays attention to who is actually walking through the door. Get the translation wrong, though, and a garbled reply can look worse than no reply at all.
If you run a hotel, restaurant, clinic, or anything near an airport, transit hub, or tourist strip, multilingual reviews aren't a rare edge case, they show up steadily. Once you've settled on a language, our restaurant review response examples and hotel review response examples guides have the star-by-star wording to adapt.
Your three options when a review isn't in your language
Once you're confident you understand what the review actually says, you have three honest ways to reply: fully in their language, in both languages, or in your own language with a line acknowledging theirs. Which one fits depends on how sure you are of the translation, not on which one looks the most impressive.
Option 1: Reply fully in their language
This is the warmest option, and the right call when you, a staff member, or a regular customer is genuinely fluent, not just translation-app confident. A native or near-native reply shows real effort. Save it for when you can vouch for the wording.
Option 2: The bilingual reply (the safe default)
Write a short reply in the reviewer's language, then repeat the same message in your own. If the translation is slightly off, your own-language version still lands correctly, so nothing important is lost. Reach for this option whenever you're not fully certain of the translation, which is most of the time.
Option 3: Reply in your language, with a warm acknowledgment
When you have no real way to verify a translation, reply in your own language and simply note that you had the review translated and appreciate it. It's the most conservative option, but it's still far better than silence or a risky guess.
Where raw machine translation goes wrong
Machine translation gets the words right far more often than it gets the tone right, and tone is most of what a review reply is. A native speaker can spot an auto-translated line within the first few words, usually from the formality level or a slightly off verb form, even when every individual word is technically correct.
- Formality and register: many languages have a formal and informal "you" (usted vs tú, Sie vs du), and picking the wrong one reads as either stiff or oddly casual for a business.
- Idioms translated literally: a phrase that's warm in English can turn nonsensical, or even rude, word-for-word in another language.
- Gender and agreement: adjectives, articles, and past participles in many languages have to agree in gender and number, and machine translation still slips here.
- Names and honorifics: some cultures expect a surname and title where you'd casually use a first name, and vice versa.
- Run translated text past a native speaker or bilingual staff member before it goes live
- Keep translated replies short, so there's less room for an error to hide
- Default to a bilingual reply whenever you're not fully sure of the translation
- Use the reviewer's name if they gave one, in whatever language you're replying
- Post a full machine-translated paragraph unread
- Guess at slang, regional dialect, or idioms you don't recognize
- Let uncertainty about the language become an excuse to skip the reply entirely
- Mix formal and informal register within the same reply
The same review, answered three ways
Here's a five-star review in Spanish, answered with the bilingual default from Option 2, the safest and most common choice.
“La comida estuvo deliciosa y el servicio fue muy atento. Fue nuestra primera vez y sin duda volveremos.”
¡Gracias por su reseña, Marisol! Nos alegra mucho que hayan disfrutado la comida y el servicio en su primera visita. ¡Esperamos verlos pronto de nuevo! / Thank you for your review, Marisol! We're so glad you enjoyed the food and service on your first visit. We hope to see you again soon!
Thank you so much for this review! We had it translated and are thrilled you enjoyed your first visit. We can't wait to welcome you back again soon.
“A reply that's a day late beats a reply that's confidently wrong in a language you don't speak.”
When to just ask a bilingual person
Loop in a fluent speaker instead of relying on an app alone whenever a review carries real weight: a serious complaint, a safety or health claim, legal-sounding language, or slang and a regional dialect a translation tool visibly can't parse. A bilingual staff member, a regular customer, or a professional translator for the rare high-stakes case will get the tone right in a way machine translation still can't.
This is the same judgment call worth applying to any review, not just the ones in another language. A friendly five-star thank-you doesn't need much deliberation. It's the sensitive few, negative, ambiguous, or in a language you can't verify, that deserve the extra two minutes. If you already use automated review replies to keep up with the everyday ones, the same hold-for-approval logic applies here: let the easy, easy-to-verify replies go out fast, and slow down on the ones you can't fully vouch for. If you want to see what a first draft looks like before committing to a full tool, the free reply generator is worth trying on a single review.
A 30-second checklist before you post
Before you hit reply on a review in a language you don't fully control, run through this once.
- Am I sure what this review actually says, not just what a translation app guessed?
- Have I picked the right option: fully translated, bilingual, or acknowledgment only, based on how confident I am?
- Did I check formality, gender agreement, and any idioms that don't translate literally?
- Would a native speaker read this and think a person wrote it, or a machine?
- If this is a negative or sensitive review, has a fluent speaker actually reviewed the wording?
None of this needs to be perfect. It needs to be honest about what you actually know, and careful with the reviews where a mistake would show. Handled that way, a review in another language stops being something to dread and becomes one more chance to show the person on the other end of it that you actually read what they wrote.