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.

[Mikael Karlsson]

Finally I have some traction and regained confidence that it's a dynamic product thanks to the advice from this thread.

[Mikael Karlsson]

After more digging it turns out that all that is needed to be able to do live translation in a simple way for only the live agent part is to set the following variable inside the topic used for Live Agent transfer:

vaVars.global_requester_session_language = '<languageCode>';

No need to configure or enable languages or conversational interfaces language settings.

We'll likely start with a method similar to the below and later use dynamic translation detection as well.

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Mikael Karlsson,

I wouldn't recommend that approach as it's a customization, in that we have a Language Detection capability natively in the platform which would essentially be broken with this customization,

Many thanks,
Kind regards 

[Mikael Karlsson]

@Alex Coope - SN absolutely, but calling that one-liner is to us less intrusive compared to enabling all supported languages in sys_language via background script while keeping business rules which check for plugins disabled. Once a zero code approach is made available to allow us full control over translation language choice for live agent chat then we'll happily flip over to that. 😉

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Mikael Karlsson,

As of the Tokyo release you do have full control over entries in the [sys_language] table except for the languages we offer a Pack for (so in your case Swedish and Norwegian) would fall under the latter.

This is by design so that we can ensure a Customer is following UX best practices and offering the UI in that language and not just an interaction or content such as KB articles, because if the end user can't read the UI how would they be able to navigate to find the desired content?

Also, the technical debt you're introducing would need to be managed and maintained each release,

Many thanks,
Kind regards