Best Practice for Translating Emails?

[Nick Peters]

We support 5 languages in total in our instance. Translating Catalog Items, Item Variables, and Question Choices has been fairly easy for us since the fields that we need to translate are the Translated Text or Translated HTML type. We have created a "translator" role, assigned it to a group, and configured ACLs that grant write access to specific fields in these tables to users in that group via the role. We have them sign into our Dev environment and have them make their changes which are captured in auto-generated Update Sets (one for each language). At the end of each month, I review the Update Sets to ensure accuracy and move forward with testing and ultimately implementation of the Update Sets to our Prod environment.

What is the best practice for translating emails, since none of the fields are configured as translated fields? We would like to empower our select few users that we have given "translator" access in Dev to translate emails as well. Up to this point, we have been creating emails in English and sending the Subject and Body to these users to translate. When we receive the translated version, we create a copy of the English email in the respective language and apply any necessary language conditions/restrictions.

Just looking for some helpful advice on how to proceed. Thank you!

[Patrick Fedigan · Accepted solution]

Hello Nick,

After reviewing other threads like Email Notification in different languages it seems the best practice for now is to have multiple Notification records as you describe.

I would open a HI ticket a submit a feature request! ServiceNow KB: Requesting ServiceNow product enhancements (KB0547257) This seems like something that a translator should be able to configure just like labels/variables/etc.

Cheers,

[Paul Kunze]

Hi Nick,

just to provide a finding after having had the same question as you did:

There is a slightly more flexible way to use email text translations which is also used in the OOTB email notifications from ServiceNow:

You can create a Mail Script and in that you can use gs.getMessage() to receive a localized text from the Messages table.

For example this is done in the notification "Incident opened for me" which uses the Mail Script "incident_has_been_opened" which holds the code template.print(gs.getMessage('An incident has been opened on your behalf.'));

[Roy Wallimann]

Hi Paul,

I tried it with a Mail Script and gs.getMessage(), but it didn't work, also not with the OOB Mail Script "incident_has_been_opened", because the notification processing is happening in the background as the system account.

Can you please tell me how did you resolve this issue?

Regards,

Roy

[Paul Kunze]

Hi Roy,

you are right, this actually does not work for emails that are sent by the platform. I just tried it myself because I was curious: When you select "Preview notification" then the translation is displayed correctly. But when an email is actually sent out then it is using the default platform language.

Seems to be an unsupported requirement as stated in an old Community post: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=8dea8f6ddb5cdbc01dcaf3231f96...

What you can only do is to use workarounds like creating several email notifications in different languages and sending them to different receiver groups as mentioned in this Community post: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=0ce7472ddb1cdbc01dcaf3231f96...

This is really annoying, I thought gs.getMessage() would be usable 😕

Even more disturbing is the fact that ServiceNow is using the method in their OOTB scripts without it having any effect.

Best regards,
Paul