How to add a new Language for Knowledge articles?

[Marek Stepien]

We added language plugins for two languages (Japanese and Chinese). 
Those plugins installed translations for all labels in the sytem, and also added language mechanism for those articles to knowledge articles. 

We need to add additional languages (eg. Spanish, Korean) for knowledge articles use only, to present articles in those languages to our customers. However, we do not want to install new plugins that adds a tone of translations, and allows the customers to change the (Customer Service) portal to that language (in user Profile), and allows our back-end developers to change the console in the new language (in System Settings dialog).

We need new languages just to write articles in those languages to allow users to select articles in those languages. 

Anyone knows how to configure it? 

I found that we can "add" a new language to the system by adding a new record to the Choices list for the Language field of the sys_user table. By doing it, we can write articles for the added language, and customers can select articles for that language at the portal. 
However, the new languages shows in User Profile and System Settings. 
I know how to remove it from User Profile (writing a filter in 'User Profile' widget) to not show the language in customer's user Profile.
However, I do not know how to add a similar filter to System Settings dialog, so internal users do not have a possibility to choose the new language. Anyone knows? 

Any help will be appreciated. 

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Marek Stepien 

Ok, so there's quite a lot to unpack there,

I would highly recommend going through our training course (the Expert Series linked on the CSC page), 

With regards to your KB articles, if you have one in another language and it's against English this will for sure need to change, so that more advanced filters in the kb_search page (or the topics page in the /esc portal can be leveraged correctly),

With regards to any OOtB translations not being correct, I can confirm that every release we do potentially make adjustments based on feedback. So if that were to happen in the future with any ootb Language Pack you can raise a Case on NowSupport and we would review the feedback to see if there's a suitably better alternative translation than the one we use (bearing in mind we have to use terms and translations either to be suitable for all Customers or across products if it's a shared term / phrase).

• Also as a side note, we adjusted a lot of Japanese translations between Quebec > Rome and again in SanDiego.

Adding UI translations now can actually be quite a bit easier with the advent of the Localization Framework so it would be well worth checking out my blog posts on the subject,

And if you'd like a call to discuss further (because I fully appreciate it's quite a daunting topic, lots of nuances and aspects) by all means email me and we can organise something accordingly,


Many thanks,
Kind regards

[Pedro Candeias]

Hello Alex,

I’m contacting you regarding the ServiceNow community topic 

I’m the PO for the Knowledge application in Siemens.

Currently we are facing the same demand as Marek has described in this post.

Our ESC is setup with the languages below which were agreed to be the main languages that can be used for user profile.

We will be adding the Canadian French also as it is required to have it.

Despite this setup, Nordic countries and others want to be able to create articles in their language so that when reading them they can select the language either in the filter or in the article widget with the language button to switch between different languages.

Is there a workaround that can be done to apply the language only for knowledge bases/articles so that all the other applications in ServiceNow aren’t affected with the need of translations?

Would appreciate to hear your thoughts on this trending topic.

BR

Pedro Candeias

Siemens - PO Knowledge

[Alex Coope - SN]

@Pedro Candeias,

So the "language" field for Knowledge articles is driven by the choices in [sys_user].preferred_language, which in-turn is driven by the languages in [sys_language] that are marked as "active=true". 

The reason it's like this is so that end-users have the UI in the same language as the content they would like to consume. When it comes to UX, it's best practice in any software / platform etc to avoid "mixed language" experiences. This is because if we put ourselves in the end-users shoes, in the worst case scenario, how could they find the content if they can't navigate the UI. Thus if you would like to allow a choice of a language that we happen to provide a Language Pack for then you can install said pack (all the Languages you mentioned, including French Canadian, are Packs that we have for the OOtB) and the choice will be available.

If you haven't already seen it, I'd highly recommend reviewing my "In-Platform Language Support Guide" linked further above, because UX is really the most important consideration when it comes to Languages in this context,

Many thanks,
kind regards