Internationalization support

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 1, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Internationalization support

    AI Search in ServiceNow supports indexing and searching across all languages provided by the ServiceNow AI Platform®. This enables search administrators to configure search features tailored to the languages activated in their instance, ensuring effective and accurate search results in a multilingual environment.

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    Search features

    The AI Search capabilities vary by language, providing advanced language-specific features for many widely used languages:

    • Languages like Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French (including Canadian), Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish support comprehensive features including Genius Results, Language identification, Lemma and Unicode normalization, Result improvement rules, Stop words, Synonyms, and Typo handling.
    • Finnish offers similar support but uses algorithmic stemming for lemma identification.
    • German, Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmål), and Swedish include decompounding in lemma and Unicode normalization.
    • Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese feature specialized language identification (including text-region and search-term identification) alongside standard normalization and enhancement features.
    • Korean also supports decompounding as part of lemma and Unicode normalization.
    • Other ServiceNow AI Platform languages support Unicode normalization, result improvement rules, stop words, and synonyms.

    Translated content search

    By default, AI Search returns results only for records translated into the user's session language. However, administrators can enhance multilingual search effectiveness through several configurations:

    • Assign Knowledge article search languages by country: Allows searches to match articles in multiple languages specified per user country in addition to the session language.
    • Configure globally searchable knowledge articles: Enables defining encoded queries to make selected knowledge articles searchable regardless of user session language.
    • Configure a fallback language: Sets an alternate language for fallback when no results are found in the session language, broadening search coverage.
    • Enable a global fallback locale: Provides a universal fallback language for all translated content searches, particularly useful to make all English-language records searchable globally.

    These options empower ServiceNow customers to optimize AI Search for multilingual environments, improving search recall and user experience across diverse language needs.

    AI Search supports indexing and search for all languages offered by the ServiceNow AI Platform®. Search administrators can configure AI Search search features for languages activated in your instance.

    For full details on language support in AI Search search features, see Internationalization support for AI Search.

    Search features

    The following table lists the AI Search search features available for specific ServiceNow AI Platform languages.

    Table 1. Search features supported by language
    Language Search features supported
    Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, French - Canada, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish
    Finnish
    German, Danish, Hungarian, Norwegian (Bokmål), and Swedish
    Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese
    Korean
    All other ServiceNow AI Platform languages activated in your instance

    Translated content search

    By default, AI Search only returns results for records with translated content, such as knowledge articles, that are in the user's ServiceNow AI Platform session language. You can modify this default behavior in the following ways:
    Assign Knowledge article search languages by country
    Improve multilingual search recall by defining a set of Knowledge article search languages for each user country. User searches can match Knowledge articles in any of the search languages specified for their country as well as in the language associated with their ServiceNow AI Platform session.
    Configure globally searchable knowledge articles
    Define an encoded query to match knowledge articles that you want to make searchable regardless of the user's session language.
    Configure a fallback language
    Set a fallback language for the user's session language. AI Search returns translated content results from the selected fallback language as well as the user's session language.
    Enable a global fallback locale for translated content
    Configure a global fallback locale to use for all translated content searches. AI Search returns translated content results from the global fallback locale's language as well as the user's session language.
    Note:
    The global fallback locale works best if you want to make all English-language records globally searchable.