Jira Service Management Translation features and troubleshooting

Jira

Jira Service Management Translation features and troubleshooting

To help companies worldwide with their international customer support, Jira Service Management offers multilingual customer support. Users can easily switch to their native language. In this blog post we want to address problems that our customers have encountered in this context and point out suitable solutions. 

What exactly is Jira Service Management? The software was recently introduced by Atlassian to empower development, IT operations, and business teams with more features to deliver excellent service experiences to their customers. The software includes Jira Service Desk and other more comprehensive ITSM functions.

When does Jira Service Management help customers?

If Jira Service Desk users use different languages, Jira Service Management can offer them translations in their respective languages.

Normally the descriptions of all fields and types are shown in the language in which the project is set up. The Jira Service Desk Admin can create different languages ​​so that the user can select their preferred language via the Service Desk Portal. Thus, it is possible to meet users' desired language preference.

What can Jira Service Management do by default?

The default language is usually set so that it corresponds to the language of most users. For example, in a German company, “German” is set as the default language. A preferred language can be selected individually for employees with a different mother tongue. For this, the Jira Service Management Standard provides the respective translation in the preferred language, so that the people in a service project can select their preferred language,

The following functions can be translated into the preferred language:

  • Customer portal, including announcements, field names and portal name
  • request types
  • Customer Notifications
  • Email Templates

A total of 22 different languages ​​are available for Jira Service Management.

How to set the preferred language?

In the Jira Administration, a new language can be easily added (1) in the project settings under language support (2), which is displayed there and can be edited. After a new language has been added, it can then be activated (3) or deactivated. Here you can also find the default language of the project. This cannot be changed here.

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What problems can arise if you want to translate the announcement banner?

In the announcement banner, you can point out to your users that they can choose their preferred language so that the content is also available in another language. To do this, the desired language must be individually adjusted in the language settings (see above).
In our example, we consider German as the default language and English as the individually selected language. We have changed the originally German announcement banner to English.

1. Problem: If you now want to adjust the individual announcement banner again afterwards, the problem can arise that when you "switch back" to the standard language, the English designations are still displayed. Even with changes to the English language, the translation cannot be edited freely, only the German standard value can be edited.

Solution: In order for the customer to be able to see different announcement banners (e.g. in English and German), an individual adjustment is required for each language. In the German standard, when changing to English, the English translation takes place.
Then the page must be saved and reloaded. The translation of the announcement cannot be changed via the portal.

2. Problem: If you switch from your preferred language back to the default language, in our example from English to German, and delete the content in the announcement banner, the announcement banner is still in English.

Solution: Temporary posting of a German translation. The banner cannot then be removed under the language support "Language Support" because according to the system there is nothing to be translated. There is no longer an announcement in German and Jira then determines that nothing can be translated into other languages ​​either.
Before deleting an announcement (e.g. that of the German language), it is essential to delete all other translations (from the fields) in order to prevent the second problem.

Extensions - How are additional fields fully translated?

If you add additional fields to the Jira Service Management Portal and want to translate them, the problem can arise that the individual options of select fields cannot be translated consistently.
In the English Service Desk, the options are then not displayed in English but as they were set in the standard. In our example above, in German.
Deviniti's Translation for Jira Service Management plugin offers a solution for this. The plugin makes it possible to configure multilingual Jira Service Management if required. Dynamic and user-defined field values ​​can be translated.
The plugin offers the additional "Translation" function in the project settings in the Jira configuration, which allows you to add new translations, as shown in the following image.
The user selects the preferred language in point (1), in this case it is English. Then the word to be translated must be entered in the standard language under Key (2). The same word in the language to be translated is entered under Value (3). This process must be carried out for each individual option. In order to apply the translations to all Service Desk projects, you can tick Shared (4).

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The Translation for Jira Service Management app supports the following value types:

  • Groups of request types
  • request types
  • Descriptions of request types
  • Fields (and the help of fields)
  • SLAs
  • Summaries (using the Post feature)
  • Help center name and welcome message

The plugin "Translation for Jira Service Management' by Deviniti is available on the Atlassian Marketplace.

Our offer to you

As an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner, we are happy to support you with further questions about Jira and Confluence and are at your disposal [email protected] is available for storage, management and analysis.