If your translation plugin ignores the chat, or your session recorder shows a blank rectangle where it should be, nothing is broken. The chat renders inside an isolated container, and most third-party scripts do not look inside one.
The trade
The isolation exists so that your theme’s styling cannot break the chat, and the chat’s styling cannot change your site’s fonts, colours, borders or spacing. That is what makes the widget look and behave the same way on every theme, without a per-theme support queue.
The cost is that scripts which scan your pages for content do not find it.
What is affected
Translation plugins — TranslatePress, Weglot, and similar — will not translate the chat’s own wording.
This matters less than it first appears. The chatbot replies in the language the visitor writes in, so a French visitor gets French answers. And Sohay’s own buttons and labels are translated through WordPress’s standard translation files, so a site running in French shows French labels. What the plugin cannot do is re-translate them on the fly.
Session-replay and heatmap tools — Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory — record the widget as a blank area. You will see that a visitor spent time there, not what they did.
If you need that data, the Conversations inbox has it in a more useful form: the actual words.
Accessibility overlays that restyle a page from the outside cannot restyle the chat.
What is not affected
Screen readers and keyboard navigation work normally. Assistive technology reads the accessibility tree, and the isolation does not hide it.
This is the distinction worth being precise about, because “invisible to plugins” sounds like an accessibility problem and is not one. The widget is invisible to scripts scraping the DOM; it is fully present to somebody using it.
Your own site is unaffected in the other direction too. The chat cannot change your typography or spacing, which is the failure mode people usually discover after installing a chat widget, not before.
Can a script reach in?
The container is open rather than sealed, so a script that explicitly supports this kind of isolation can still reach the chat’s content. Most third-party scripts do not — they were written before this was common.
If a vendor asks whether their tool can access it, that is the answer: it can, if it is built to.
If this is a dealbreaker
It is not configurable. The isolation is structural, not a setting.
If translating the chat’s wording matters more than theme-proof styling, the
right route is a WordPress translation file for the sohaychat text domain,
which does reach the labels.
Where to go next
Branding the widget for what you can change, and The Conversations inbox for the data a session recorder would have shown you.
