Languages: multi-language banners and per-locale text

Cookie Munch keeps two "language" settings clearly separate: the language your banner shows to site visitors, and the language your dashboard is displayed in for you. This guide is about the banner side — how to make it show up in the right language automatically, and how far that automatic translation goes.

Where to set it

In Banner Studio, open Settings → Targeting. The Languages section at the top has two controls:

The 10 built-in languages

Cookie Munch ships built-in banner translations for ten languages out of the box — no setup required to get correct wording in any of them:

Pick any of these from the Default language dropdown. Here's how the two settings interact: with auto-detect on, a visitor whose browser reports French (fr) sees the French banner regardless of what you've set as the default — the default language only kicks in when auto-detect is off, or when a visitor's browser language isn't one of the supported ten.

What gets translated automatically — and what doesn't

Every built-in piece of banner UI — the Accept/Reject/Save buttons, the standard category labels and descriptions, and the privacy-policy link text — is translated for you across all ten languages, no action needed.

What is not auto-translated is any text you've typed yourself: headings and body copy you've written in Banner Studio, custom category labels and descriptions you've defined under Settings → Categories, and anything you've added through the IAB TCF panel. Those show up exactly as you typed them, in whatever language you wrote them in, for every visitor — Cookie Munch doesn't run your custom copy through machine translation. If a visitor sees the banner in German because of auto-detect, your custom heading will still show up in whatever language you originally typed it, unless you've explicitly supplied a translated version for that locale.

In practice this means: rely on the built-in translations for anything standard, and if you've customized wording that needs to appear correctly in multiple languages, you're responsible for supplying that translated text yourself for each locale you support.

Dashboard language

Separately from all of the above, the Cookie Munch dashboard — the app you're using to configure everything — is fully localized on its own, and follows your browser or account locale automatically. This is completely independent of any property's banner language setting: you can run a French-language banner on a client's site while managing it day-to-day from an English dashboard, or the reverse. Changing one never changes the other.

Language and geo-targeting together

Language and geo-targeting rules (under Settings → Targeting → Geo) are configured independently, but they're designed to compose. You can pair a region rule (say, an opt-in default for a set of EU country codes) with region-appropriate banner wording, so a German-market visitor gets both the right consent mode and the right language — not just one or the other.

Tips

• If most of your traffic comes from a single market, turn auto-detect off and just set the default language — it's one less moving part and guarantees a consistent experience regardless of what a visitor's browser reports.

• If you serve a genuinely international audience, leave auto-detect on and pick the language most of your remaining, unmatched traffic uses as the default (a US-based analytics tool, for instance, might default to English for the rare visitor whose browser language isn't in the supported ten).

• Before publishing a design with custom headings or custom categories, check it in Preview with a couple of different languages in mind — remember that custom text you typed won't automatically follow the visitor's language the way the built-in buttons and standard categories do.

• Keep custom category labels short and clear regardless of language — they sit next to a toggle switch, not a paragraph, so translated versions should aim for the same brevity as the originals.