Translate Twitch chat in real time

The Combined Chat Translator is a bot that sits in your Twitch or Kick chat, spots messages written in other languages, and posts a translation straight back into chat. You can read it on stream, your viewers can read it, and nobody has to install anything.

Sign in with Twitch  or  sign in with Kick to switch it on. It is free while in beta.

What it looks like in chat

A viewer writes in their own language and, a moment later, the bot posts the translation with their name and the language pair:

• hyorin_k: 오늘 방송 너무 재밌어요
• CombinedChat: [by hyorin_k] Today's stream is so much fun (ko > en)
• mateo_gg: alguien sabe cuándo empieza el torneo?
• CombinedChat: [by mateo_gg] does anyone know when the tournament starts? (es > en)

Emotes are taken out before translating and put back afterwards, so they still render. When you press start, the bot posts one short line saying translation is on, so nobody wonders why it has appeared. You can switch that notice off.

Setting it up

1. Sign in with the Twitch or Kick account you stream on. Sign-in only confirms which channel is yours; it does not give the translator access to your account.
2. Choose the language you want to read chat in. Everything written in any other language is translated into it.
3. Press Start translating. The bot joins your chat within a few seconds.
4. Type /mod CombinedChat in your chat once, on Twitch and on Kick. On both platforms, slow mode and follower-only mode block a bot that is not a moderator, and Twitch also limits how often it can post.

The bot remembers that it is switched on. If the server restarts, it rejoins your chat by itself, without posting the start notice again.

What gets translated, and what is left alone

Stream chat is mostly short, and most of it does not need translating. Posting a translation of "lol" or "gg" would bury the messages that matter, so the translator is strict about what it sends:

• Messages already in your language are skipped.
• Chat shorthand and reactions such as "lol", "gg", "W", "sheesh" and "bruh" are skipped, even though they are not dictionary words.
• Laughter in any language, like "ㅋㅋㅋ", "jajaja", "wwww" and "хахаха", is skipped.
• Commands starting with !, messages from other bots such as Nightbot and StreamElements, and emote-only messages are skipped.
• Very short Latin-script messages are only translated when the language is clear. The bot would rather miss a two-word message than post a wrong translation of an English one.
• Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Arabic and Hebrew are recognised from their script, so even one or two characters get translated.

If a message you expected to see translated was not, the dashboard lists recent skipped messages alongside the reason for each.

Languages

Chat can be translated into or out of English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Vietnamese, Thai, Filipino, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, Greek, Czech, Romanian and Hungarian. You can also limit it to particular languages, for example only Spanish and Portuguese, and leave the rest alone.

A chat bot or a browser extension?

There are two kinds of chat translator, and they solve different problems.

A browser extension translates chat for the one person who installed it. That suits a viewer who wants to follow a stream in a language they do not speak. It does nothing for anyone else in the room, and it cannot show a translation on your stream.

A bot translates for everyone at once. The translation is an ordinary chat message, so it appears for every viewer, in your own chat window, in overlays, and in VODs. The viewer who wrote in Korean sees that they were understood, and the rest of chat can reply. The trade-off is that the bot adds messages to chat. If you would rather keep chat clean, turn off posting and the translations appear only on your dashboard.

With Combined Chat

Because translations are posted as real chat messages, they show up in Combined Chat and its OBS overlay like any other message. If you stream to Twitch and Kick at the same time, switch the translator on for both and every translation lands in the one merged feed.

What it does not do yet

YouTube and Rumble are not supported. YouTube's chat API allows only a small number of bot messages per day across the whole service, which a busy chat would use up within minutes. The translator does not translate speech or add subtitles; it works on chat only.

Privacy

Messages that need translating are sent to Google Cloud Translation. Chat is not logged; the dashboard keeps only the last few dozen translations in memory, and they are cleared whenever the server restarts. The translator privacy page has the details.

Common questions

Is there a free Twitch chat translator bot?

Yes. The Combined Chat Translator is free while in beta. Sign in with Twitch at translate.combinedchat.com, choose your language and press start.

Does the translator bot need to be a moderator?

It works without it, but slow mode and follower-only mode block a bot that is not a moderator on both Twitch and Kick, and Twitch also limits how often it can post. Type /mod CombinedChat in your chat once on each platform to avoid all of that.

Does it translate Kick chat too?

Yes. It works on Kick the same way it does on Twitch, and you can run it on both channels at once with a different language for each.

Will it translate my own messages?

Yes, if you write in a language other than the one chat is being translated into, so a Korean-speaking streamer typing in Korean can have their messages translated into English for everyone else.

Can I read translations without the bot posting in chat?

Yes. Turn off posting and translations appear only on your dashboard, so you can follow chat in other languages without adding bot messages.