I’ve written a bit about the translation project that I did for a client using the Google Translate API to dynamically translate incoming incident and request data.
I generally find that one of the more difficult part of most projects is figuring out what already built resources are out there that you can take advantage of.
That isn’t to say that the rest of the project is easy, necessarily, but for the most part, once I know what existing assets can be leveraged, creating the incremental improvements are usually pretty straightforward.
In the spirit of that, for anyone who might be coming at a translation-related project inside of ServiceNow, here are a couple of off the shelf translation assets that you may not know about already.
Firstly, the ability to create translations for existing field labels is a built in piece of functionality (I believe it only becomes available after you download one of the plugins for language translations (French, Spanish, etc.).
Once you’ve installed one of those plugins, you can add translations via the sys_translated table. It’s not dynamic (meaning that you have to put the values you want translated into the table before you need them, or write something of your own to dynamically populate that table), but it does create a much better experience for user who speak languages other than English.
The other bit of translation functionality that I leveraged in my project is the sys_ui_message table. Entries to this table are accessible using the built-in getMessage() function.
That allows you to put translations of common words or phrases into the table, and then pass the English value via your code and get back the translated value from the table.
I hope that one or both of those functions are helpful to one of my readers in the future!