Dynamic Translation for Chat without having to install language plugin and change portal language!

[Mikael Karlsson]

We're in a pickle since we want to do dynamic translation of chat without necessarily changing the chatting user's portal language. This is not possible at the moment according to Support.

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Please vote for my idea!

https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=view_idea&sysparm_idea_id=d74e74891b7fd910587a11751a4bcb96&sysp...

Idea body:

I know there is a similar idea which was closed with "unlikely to implement" but this needs to be looked at again.

Dynamic Translation can detect language easily, why are we then forced install non-uninstallable portal translation plugins and set preferred language in the user profiles in order to support that language in the chat? The platform gets cluttered with feature translations and users are forced to view a "not very well translated" portal.

I bet you there are hundreds of customers which want to keep their portal in English but allow live chat translation for workers who want quick support but are not comfortable with English. It would have been so simple to detect and confirm the first utterance language and then continue the session using that. Or introduce a "preferred chat" language field on the user, which DOESN'T translate the whole portal.

The product team really needs to rethink this and utilize the potential of Dynamic Translation.

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Mikael Karlsson,

Ok, so there's a few UX things to consider here, which is a partial reason we enforce the Language Pack installation (if it's for one of those 22 languages),

When considering the UX for the end-user (assuming they can't read / speak English very well),

it would be extremely difficult for that user to understand or interact with the UI and find where VA is or where the search is, which is what is very common in a multitude of industries.

Therefore, best practice is to always translate the UI as much as possible to help ensure the end-user is as catered for as possible. We have a wealth of information on the topic ranging from our CSC page here (check out the workbook), to our "In-Platform Language Support Guide" detailing what is possible and how, all the way through to how to translate a portal with the Localization Framework,

And if you'd like to discuss over a call, by all means send me an email and we can organise something,

Many thanks,
Kind regards
 

[Mikael Karlsson]

Thanks @Alex Coope - SN  for taking time to look into this post, such customer focus is very much appreciated!

We totally understand the UX complications when seen with a all-platform usability approach, but ServiceNow usually always provides the customers with options and power to decide for themselves, but here i feel we're basically locked in. We will never have the capacity of maintaining a translated portal, but want to support our workers with best-effort local language chat support.

We can inform our user population that if they need support in their own language, they can open the portal  and ask the Virtual Agent something (or the agent would have a greeting containing top languages), and if the language chosen/detected was other than English then it could ask for confirmation before sending to human queue.

We also know in our organization at least that most who are not fully comfortable explaining technical issues in English still does a great job navigating and using English portals and sites. Forcing them to flip most of the UI to their native language will in our case will likely cause a worse experience.

(I've heard that it might be possible to inject enabled languages entries to sys_language via background script and thereby get at least half way to what i'm after and we'll attempt that even though it feels wrong since that would basically be our first real customization.)

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Mikael Karlsson,

So the restriction for DT, is just about whether the languages records are active=true or not. It is certainly possible to change the active value either by background script / fix script or other means, but I'd highly recommend reviewing my post with the associated webinar about how to translate a portal as it may not be as much effort as you necessarily think (depending on the quantity of languages),

Many thanks,
Kind regards 

[Mikael Karlsson]

@Alex Coope - SN 

We'll definitely take a closer look at your previously posted content.

We currently support 15 live-translated languages in our current chat solution, most of these languages have no IT personnel who could help sanity-check portal translations in case we decide to go that route.

Today in our current tool which we are migrating from we ask the user before the session starts.