Impact of changing core_country.name to "translated text" field

[Bernd Hoffmeier]

We are a global acting company and our SN environment runs with currently 4 languages (EN, DE, FR, RU). We had a recent rollout of a process which brought up an interesting finding.

We have a record in the core_company table which contains out-of-the-box a reference to the core_country table. We use this field to display in what country the company is registered. Unfortunately if you switch your language to anything else then English, the country names are still in English because the core_country.name field is "String" and not "Translated Text".

Will there be any impact if we switch the dictionary type?

Have you ever experienced this in your multi lingual environments?

I'm always careful changing things on a core table.

[Bernd Hoffmeier]

Ok with this I can change the label from the name field to different languages. My issue is with the values of the field, not the label.

[GodOfWar]

Here is the one for the text field translations:

https://docs.servicenow.com/en-US/bundle/tokyo-platform-administration/page/administer/localization/...

Mark Helpful/Correct if this helps.

[Alex Coope - SN]

@GodOfWar, @Bernd Hoffmeier,

To avoid confusions for others (as the thread is reading like the ask is being mis-understood), have you read my reply above, as that is what you'll need to do,

And if you're interested in learning how the 5 translation tables work (and why they are the way they are) you can check out my blog post here,

Many thanks,
Kind regards

[Alex Coope - SN · Accepted solution]

@Bernd Hoffmeier,

So typically changing the field type of a "string" to "translated_text" should cause no impact providing you do not change the length of the field. This will for sure need to be tested in a sub-prod, but it's actually our recommendation for being able to translate a report title (you'll find a KB article on NowSupport stating you need to do the exact same thing).
- A "translated_text" field is just another type of string field, just with some extra logic to handle translations.

Super important note -> do this via an actual dictionary change so that the "XMLSerializer" is associated to the field as an attribute. If it doesn't then the translations will not work (it should be added automatically if you make the change on the field entry in sys_dictionary),

Many thanks,
Kind regards