Just before the Christmas break I was asked to help out an interesting issue for a Customer that was about to go-live with a bunch of languages. So for my first post in the new year, I thought it would be a great topic to cover.
The high-level was that when-ever the user searched for an item in another language it wouldn't present the results that they were expecting, so lets look into what the symptoms of the issue were, what was the cause (as it's an often overlooked area) and how it can be resolved.
Unable to search the catalog in other languages
Using some ootb demo data I can quickly replicate what was happening. In this scenario I'm navigating to the Catalog search in the Service Portal with my preference set to french and I'm searching for the word "laptop" in French which in my translations is "portable". Whilst the search does perform an action, I'm not seeing the types of results I would expect:
This is what was being observed:
Yet in English we see the following:
We can see that some items are matching, but what we want isn't. The reason for this is all to do with the "Text Index", because in this scenario we're not using AI Search.
Fixing it
OOtB, there is already an index job designed for the [sc_cat_item] table (System Definitions > Text Index Configurations) :
However, in some situations when a lot of translations are added, you may need to rebuild the index, which you can do by navigating to System Definitions > Text Indexes, and finding the one for the [sc_cat_item] table:
Essentially, what needs to be done here, is the index needs to be regenerated so that the translated terms can be taken into account for the search terms, so click the "Regenerate Text Index" related link and wait a few hours for it to complete.
Then, you should be able to see the following type of result when searching in another language you have translations for:
Summary
The good news is that providing you've already brought in all of your translations for all of your go-live languages, you only need to perform this action once. Meaning, it doesn't need to be done per language. It's also important to highlight that this should already be happening, however the takeaway here is that if you are observing the original behaviour then this is almost certainly the culprit.
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