When using our products in any language other than English, you might have noticed that some of the text was still appearing in English.
The first thought that would come to mind is that case is “Why is my instance bilingual?
My answer to that is: "Is it really?"
Indeed, some of those English sentences or words are untranslated by design. Let's try and understand together why.
Like many companies, ServiceNow has a list of terms and sentences that cannot be translated to English no matter which language your instance is translated into. The decision regarding the handling of those terms is made by taking into consideration the many legal requirements that come into play when copyrights are concerned. Our internal policy dictates that some terms part of our Product and Application Portfolio terminology should never be translated. And as you might know, Service Now has many Products and Applications designed specifically to suit all our clients' needs, from ITSM to FSM or Vaccine Management. That is one of the reasons why you will see Knowledge Management in English in your Japanese portal for example
But then, why is it that sometimes you see Knowledge Management translated in your language?
There are two answers to that:
#1 Terms like Knowledge Management or ITSM are both untranslatable Products’ names, as well as widely used IT concepts in many languages. It means that when used in a non ServiceNow official capacity, they should be translated to ensure the best user experience for our customers.
#2 The second reason directly derives from the first point above, and it is a very human reason.
Sometimes, it can be difficult, when working in a translation environment, to be sure that a term should indeed be translated or not. That is why the Internationalization team conducts, before every new release, an extensive linguistic testing program. Unfortunately, it does happen that a few terms escape our vigilance, and Product names that should have been left in English are translated or vice-versa, resulting in awkward translations.
One of the main instructions we give our translators and that we follow ourselves because of the possible legal implications is:
“ When in doubt, leave it in English!”
Many of such terms appear as standalone in our translation environment, meaning that they are a single word piece of string, ready to be used to fill some placeholders we cannot identify at the time of translation.
The internationalization team and the developers are working together to reduce the use of those types of strings in our code. However, many of those results from old code we call a legacy. They predate the existing localized versions, and they can be hard to catch!
Other terms, part of our Product and Application Portfolio terminology, have been cleared to be translated. They are usually longer like Map UI Component for threat and alert data feeds. Luckily those translatable terms constitute most of our portfolio terminology.
So, how can you know if a term is translated or untranslated by design?
One of the easiest ways to find out is to look at the Application Navigator. If a term is translated or untranslated there, chances are this is how it should appear in the Now Platform.
What can you do when you think that a term has not been properly handled?
- Have a look at the Application Navigator to see how the term should be handled.
- Enable the 18h debugging to verify that the string is not hardcoded.
If you think it is wrong or if the table prefix is missing, you can log a PRB, addressed to the i18n team, and we will have a look at it.
If it is not wrong and not hardcoded, but you still prefer to have this term translated (or not) you can customize your instance by translating those terms as long as they appear in one of the five localization tables (more info here).
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