Slack Message Language
How Kit picks the language of a Slack message. One language your account chooses for shared channels, each person's own language for direct messages.
Why It Matters
The language of a Slack post used to depend on who set it off. A German admin advanced a candidate and the channel got German. A scheduled reminder fired overnight with nobody behind it and the same channel got English. Nobody chose either one; the channel inherited whoever happened to click, so a single thread could change language halfway down.
That is now settled by a setting instead of by circumstance. A channel is written in one language your account picks. A direct message is written in the language of the person reading it.
The Rule
| Where Kit posts | Language it uses |
|---|---|
| A shared Slack channel | Your account’s Channel language setting |
| A Slack direct message | The recipient’s own Preferred language, from their profile |
One setting decides every channel. Nothing decides a DM except the reader’s own profile; the channel language never reaches into someone’s direct messages.
What the Channel Language Controls
Everything Kit writes into a channel:
- Hiring notifications: new applicants, stage moves, offers, and the summaries pinned under a candidate’s post.
- Vulnerability report cards and their thread replies: the card itself, and every status change, SLA breach, bounty and disbursement reply hanging under it. See Slack Report Threads.
- Outreach alerts: campaign and prospect notifications.
- The day-7 stall escalation: the public nudge at the end of the anti-stall ladder.
- Link previews: the small cards Slack draws when a teammate pastes a Kit URL into a channel.
Important
A private per-candidate channel is still a channel. A candidate channel is private and often small, but it holds several teammates rather than one reader, so it follows the account’s channel language like any other. “Channel” here means shared, not public.
What It Doesn’t Control
| Not governed by this setting | What decides it instead |
|---|---|
| Personal Slack DMs | The recipient’s Preferred language; see Personal Slack Notifications |
| Kit emails to your team | Each person’s own profile language |
| Candidate and researcher emails | The job posting’s communication language, or the portal’s |
| Your career portal | Career portal languages |
| KitBot answers and AI-written summaries | The question it was asked, or the text it was summarising; a model writes its own prose |
| Anything a teammate types in the channel | Them |
Where to Find It
Go to Integrations → Slack and look for Channel language in the Features section:
Choose one language for all Kit posts in shared Slack channels.
Set Channel message language (English, Deutsch, Español, Français, Polski) and click Save. Any account admin can change it, and the next message Kit posts uses the new language.
The help text under the select is the part that catches people out:
This setting applies to shared channels. Direct messages use each member’s preferred language.
Your career portal’s language is a choice about candidates; your Slack channel language is a choice about your own team. An account can run a Polish careers page and English internal channels, or the reverse.
The Default, and What Changes for You
The default is English, and no account was migrated to anything else. So from the moment this ships, every account’s channel messages are in English until an admin picks something else, including accounts whose team is entirely German or Polish and who were used to seeing their own language most of the time, because most of the clicks came from their own staff.
If that describes you, it is one dropdown: set Channel language to your team’s language and your channels read the way they used to. This time they stay that way, including for the scheduled posts that always came out English no matter what.
Note
Changing the setting does not translate Slack history. New notifications use the selected language. Cards that Kit later refreshes after a data change can also adopt it. Older thread replies keep the language in which they were sent.
Picking a Language for a Mixed Channel
A channel gets one language, so choose for the room rather than for the majority:
- Pick what everyone in the channel can read, not what most of them prefer. A German channel with two English-speaking contractors is unreadable for two people; an English channel is second-best for everyone and locks nobody out.
- Count the guests. Slack Connect members and multi-channel guests from other companies see every card in a routed channel, and they often share no language with your staff.
- There is no per-channel override. One setting covers every channel your account routes to, so when two channels have different audiences, pick the language that works for the wider one.
- Nobody loses their own language entirely. Anyone who finds the channel language hard going still gets their action-required notifications as DMs in their own language, provided Preferred language is set on their profile.
Quick Checklist
- Set Channel language under Integrations → Slack; it is English until you do
- Pick the language everyone in the channel can read, guests included
- Tell teammates their DMs follow the Preferred language on their own profile
- The setting does not translate all past messages; new posts and subsequently refreshed cards use the selected language