At some point, most of the companies have to answer the following question "How do I deal with languages in my organisation?".
The answer tends to be one of the following:
- Forcing employees to use a common language accross the whole organisation.
- Bear in mind this isn't a solution for customer service
- Having local Service Desks that handle the different regional languages by hiring people who speak multiple regional languages.
- ie: A Service Desk that has members that speak French, Italian and German to cover Switzerland
- Instructing their Service Desk/s to translate messages from and to end users o that everyone can understand each other.
Fortunately, ServiceNow have helped automating the third case, which is the cheapest approach to implement and the preferred one by end users as they can be answered in their native language no matter which one this is.
ServiceNow can be connected to IBM Watson, Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure out of the box to easily translate texts.
There is another common use case for translating texts, translating Knowledge articles, although that will be covered in a future blog article.
Prior to configure any of these services, please, bear in mind there are some limitations you should be aware of.
Configuring the platforms
The first thing that needs to be done is to install the Dynamic Translation plugin:
After this, the necessary plugin needs to be installed, this will depend on the technology that needs to be used. The three options are Google Cloud Translator Service Spoke, IBM Watson Translator Spoke and the Microsoft Azure Translator Service Spoke. In this blog article I have chosen the latter for no special reason.
If our company isn’t currently consuming services from any of those three companies, we should check the price, number of characters and potential limitations of each of those. In Microsoft’s case, the first tier (S0) is limited to 2M characters, although they have more tiers in case more characters need to be translated.
Once the previously mentioned plugins are installed, the “Dynamic Translation” application will appear in the instance. Within the Translator Configurations there will be one for Microsoft, we should set as Active and Default.
In order to connect it to Azure, we need to go to https://portal.azure.com/ log in with our credentials and type “translate” in the search bar. That will show us the Cognitive services, which is what we will be consuming.
Creating the service is easy and will take 1 minute. Just ensure it has a unique name.
Once the service is up and running, we will be given 2 keys and an endpoint. We will need to copy the Key 1 and endpoint to be entered in ServiceNow. In order to do so, we will need to go to “Connection & Credential Aliases” under the “Integration Hub” application and find the following record which we need to click on:
At the end of the record, we can see the “Connections” related list, where we will have to create a new one.
In the “Connection URL” we have to enter the endpoint obtained from Azure, and the Credential record should be a new “API Key Credentials” type, which will have the “Key 1” we obtained in Azure, as the “API Key”
So far, we have plugged ServiceNow to Azure, to be able to consume their translation services, but now we must tell ServiceNow which fields we would like to have this feature enabled.
To do so there is an attribute called “Dynamic Translation Enabled” that needs to be set to true in each field we would like to translate. This can be done in the Dictionary entry of that very field under the “Attributes” related list.
We need to create a new attribute, which should look like this:
Note that only the following field types can use this:
- String
- String (Full UTF-8)
- Multi Line Small Text Area
- Wide Text
Check out this documentation article for further information.
By creating this attribute, we will be telling ServiceNow to display a new button next to the field 
Results
This is the aspect of the ticket seen in the original language, in this case we are using English:
If another user whose interface is in a different language -Spanish in this case- clicks on the translation icon mentioned before, the translated text will be shown just below the field itself.
As mentioned at the beginning, the translation services can also be used to translate Knowledge Articles, I will explain that it in another blog article I will soon be working on.
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