Localization

Configure your tours, banners, and announcements to display in the user's locale.

How it works

For tours and announcements, you can create any number of Translations.

Each translation is keyed on a BCP 47 language tag.

When a tour or announcement is displayed, PostHog chooses the translation based on the user's browser language or your override_display_language config setting.

Creating translations

Set the default language

First, set the default language for your tour.

When you set a default language, all existing tour content is mapped to the new default.

This is used as a fallback when the user's language cannot be determined, or when your tour does not support the user's provided language.

Open the Translations panel in the editor, and enter a language code that represents your tour's default.

Add a new language

Once the default is set, you can add more languages in the same Translations panel.

Enter a new language code, click the plus button to add it, then click the language card to select it.

Once selected, a new language code appears at the top of the editor, and you can make any changes necessary for this translation.

If you have other translatable fields beyond the pop-up content, they appear below the content editor.

Language code matching

When determining which tour translation to use, we run the following checks in this order:

1. Exact match – A user with language en-US matches a tour with translation en-US.
2. Base match – If no exact matches are found, we check for translations matching the user's "base" language. For example, a user language en-GB will match a tour with translation en, if no translation exists specifically for en-GB.
3. Fallback – If neither of the above are successful, we fall back to the tour's default language.

Language overrides

By default, PostHog uses the user's browser language to determine which tour translation to show.

This can be overridden by setting the override_display_language property in posthog.init.

// set in posthog.init
posthog.init('<ph_project_token>', {
  api_host: '<ph_app_host>',
  defaults: '2026-01-30',
  disable_product_tours: false,
  override_display_language: 'en-US',
});

You can also use the posthog.set_config method to change the configuration after initialization.

posthog.set_config({
  override_display_language: 'en-GB',
})

Which languages should you support?

This is different for everyone, but you can quickly check common browser languages from your users by running a query like this in the SQL editor:

SELECT 
    properties.$browser_language AS language,
    uniq(distinct_id) AS unique_users
FROM events
WHERE event = '$pageview'
    AND timestamp >= now() - interval 30 day
GROUP BY language
ORDER BY unique_users DESC
LIMIT 100

This will show the top 100 languages based on $pageview events, grouped by distinct IDs, in the past 30 days.