Multilingual Search for Catalog Items in Employee Center

[KristianPepa]

Our goal is that when a user has English selected as their language and searches for a catalog item using German terms, the item should still appear in Employee Center

Currently, search results are returned based on the users selected language
For example, if a user has English selected, they can only find catalog items when searching using English terms

All catalog items already have a German translation

Is it possible to enable multi language search in Employee Center so that catalog items can be found regardless of the users selected language, without relying on meta tags?

[Alex Coope - SN]

Hi @KristianPepa,

Yes you can, however if the term doesn't match the opposing language it wouldn't know what to present. For example the word for laptop and computer in English and German is different (as are it's synonyms and homonyms). So (as per best-practice) it wouldn't be a good experience for the user to have their experience in English and search in German to then fill in their request in English.

How would they know where or how to search for something if they don't understand what they are looking at?

Hence, the best-practice is to ensure you avoid a mixed language experience by translating everything (the Portal, the Catalogs, KB articles etc) so that they can navigate and consume the services in their respective languages. That's a massive oversimplification but the key takeaway is - try as best as possible to ensure per language consistency.

I would highly recommend reviewing the content in the "In Platform Language Support Guide" post,  and potentially watching the "Breaking Language Barriers" session at the bottom of that post to get a solid understanding of how it all comes together,

Many thanks,
Kind regards