Dynamic Translate Script Include

[Andrew Swallows]

Dynamic Translate Use Case

I recently had a customer where there was a transition from catalog item to incident. The variables were sent into the work notes. However, they also had people across the world putting data in different lanugages. The english speaking fulfillers couldn't read the concatinated worknotes. As a result, I came up with a utility Script Include to take any string and run the dynamic translation API calls over it to:

1. Detect any language of the string passed in
2. Translate the string to desired language if not already in that language

Dynamic Translate Script Include

var DynamicTranslateStringUtil = Class.create();
DynamicTranslateStringUtil.prototype = {
    initialize: function() {
    },

	translateString: function(stringText, translateTo){
			try{
				//translation answer.name into translateTo language (e.g. "en") no matter what the orginal language was using Dynamic Translation API
				//using API: https://developer.servicenow.com/dev.do#!/reference/api/washingtondc/server/sn_dt_api-namespace/DynamicTranslation#DynTran-getDetectedLanguage_S_O?navFilter=dynamicTran
				var translationCodeResponse = sn_dt_api.DynamicTranslation.getDetectedLanguage(stringText, {"translator": "Microsoft"});
				//example from API documentation just prints this - however I wanted to crawl to specific values and needed to parse it
				var parser = new JSONParser();
				//parsing was failing so I had to JSON.stringify the response from the API, which seems to have just added double quotes around some values, but allowed the parsing
				var parsedData = parser.parse(JSON.stringify(translationCodeResponse));
				var code = parsedData.detectedLanguage.code;
				//if language code is translateTo don't need to translate
				if(code!=translateTo){
					var translatedText = sn_dt_api.DynamicTranslation.getTranslation(stringText, {
								"targetLanguages": [code, translateTo],
								"additionalParameters": [{
									"parameterName": "texttype",
									"parameterValue": "plain"
								}],
								"translator": "Microsoft"
							});
					//again had to parse and stringify the results in order to parse the JSON coming back
					translatedParsed = new JSONParser().parse(JSON.stringify(translatedText));
					//first record is the orginal text so skipping to index 1 with translated text
					translatedTextToLanguage = translatedParsed.translations[1].translatedText;
					stringText=translatedTextToLanguage;
				}
			}catch(e){
				//I like to just append the class name in so if there is an error its obvious where it came from
				gs.error("DynamicTranslateStringUtil: " + e.toString());
			}
			//end translation to toLanguage
			return stringText;
		},
    type: 'DynamicTranslateStringUtil'
};

and then to call this script we simply do something like this:

var translationUtil = new DynamicTranslateStringUtil();
var englishString = translationUtil.translateString("<some text in here>", "en");

I commented where I ran into some issues that took time to figure out and figured I'll post it and see if anyone else needs something like this. Attached is the update set with the script include!

[Alex Coope - SN]

love it, thanks for this awesome idea @Andrew Swallows 👍