Translation and Fallback Language Options for SAP Enable Now Web Assistant

Translation? Yes, please!

Who doesn’t like in-application help in their native language? Right? So with the Web Assistant, you can provide your in-application content in the target application user interface language – automatically. Means if I have my SuccessFactors in Spanish, I can see my in-app help in Spanish, too!

Of course the content has to be translated first. The easiest way to translate content is using machine translation. This is possible within SAP Enable Now if you already have or are ready to buy an SAP Translation Hub license. Check out this book page from the What’s New 2011 Guide to learn more about this cool feature.

There are different options to use translation functionality inside and outside of SAP Enable Now.

• Machine Translation using SAP Translation Hub
• Automatic Translation using SAP Enable Now Dictionaries
• Manual Translation

I’ll explain those options in more detail later on.

Additionally, I would like to introduce a new feature for Web Assistant (coming with Web Assistant version 3.0.1.). The preview version was released on 22.03.2021. See this blog to learn how to set up the preview version of Web Assistant. Now you can configure the fallback language individually for each user language, where before there was one default fallback language. More details on this also below.

Machine Translation using SAP Translation Hub

Since release 2011, the SAP Enable Now Producer can connect to SAP Translation Hub to send texts to be translated. See this short explanation video for an overview.

Please note that a separate SAP Translation Hub license is required. You can start off with a trial license, attainable from the SAP Store.

1. Check out this video which shows you how to set up your trial version.
2. Read this blog to get instructions about how to create a service instance for document translation.
3. If you have further questions, please reach out to the SAP Translation Hub team or your CEE.

You can translate almost all texts using SAP Translation Hub – this includes Web Assistant objects as well as book page, simulation, and text units texts. It makes sense to translate your custom texts using SAP Translation Hub and use the automatic translation explained below for the automatically generated texts.

To get started, select the object tree or group you want to translate and insert a text unit with the type “Translation Information”. Then go to Tools > Localization > Machine Translation. Note this is available from the explorer view in Producer, not when you have opened an object.

Machine Translation

The pop-up will ask you to insert your Service URL, Token URL, Client ID, and Client Secret. You will get this information when you set up your SAP Translation Hub document translation service.

Afterwards, you can select the language(s) into which you want to translate – your target language(s). Click here to check which language pairs are currently available for SAP Translation Hub. You can select more than one target language. Additionally, you have three options:

• Only Object Properties: This will translate only the object properties, meaning everything in the grey area on the right side of your Producer explorer like short description, description, and keywords.
• Include Control Names: Relevant for simulations, where during recording the control (field) names were recorded. If you check this, the names will be translated. Be aware that the translation might not match the actual application translation but can help if you don’t plan to rerecord the screen shots.
• Include Generated Project Texts: If you check this box, the default generated texts for simulations will also be translated. I wouldn’t recommend to check this because you can use automatic translation for those texts.

After clicking “Ok”, the Producer will send the texts to be translated and automatically duplicate your selected structure in the target language(s).

Automatic Translation using Dictionaries

SAP Enable Now contains dictionaries for standard texts for 44 different languages and language variants. Using the Producer, you can automatically translate the generated project texts into those languages.

Generated project texts are the texts that are added automatically by the system when you record a simulation, like “Click Open Help”. “Click” is generated project text, “Open Help” is the control name.

Generated Project Texts

You can translate those generated simulation texts for each simulation individually or for several at once. Go to Tools > Localization > Automated Translation and then chose the target language. Make sure to duplicate your original simulation before translation. Each object has one specified language.

Automated Translation

For Web Assistant objects, this option is not relevant, because all the text is created manually. So since there is no generated text, the SAP Enable Now dictionaries cannot be used.

Manual Translation

If you want to translate custom texts without SAP Translation Hub, you can use the manual translation. This is not just manually putting in the translations into the text fields, rather you can export a translation document for each object. The idea is to translate the texts outside of SAP Enable Now or involve a translation agency, and then import the texts back in.

Using the export and import, you can continue to work on the objects while the text is being translated. Since the export contains the IDs of the source macros, the imported texts will be placed exactly where they came from.

You can export the translation documents for a single simulation or a whole tree. Remember to create a text unit with the type “Translation Information” at the top of the tree you want to translate.

Text Unit Translation Information

Fallback Language for Web Assistant

A fallback language is used if content is not found for the target application language.

With Web Assistant version 3.0.1. we now have options to change the fallback language. This version was released on 08.04.2021.

The list of fallback languages can now be configured individually for each user language. Availability of languages will be checked in the specified order based on the user language and the best match will be shown to the user.

Web Assistant Default Fallback Languages

In addition, the global fallback language can now be configured , in case you prefer e.g. British English over American English as the fallback for all languages that are not provided.

Please note that this feature currently only affects help content and learning content (since version 3.0.4). Guided tours still use the old mechanism.

Setting the Global Fallback Language

The default fallback language is English (US): en-US. It is also used after searching the fallback language chain.
For example, if no content is available in Spanish (Mexico), Spanish (Spain) and Spanish (Columbia), the global fallback language is used to check if content is available in English (United States).

You can define a different language via the parameter globalLanguageFallback.

• For example, use British English: globalLanguageFallback=en-GB;
• You can also suppress the global language fallback: globalLanguageFallback=null;In this case, no fallback content will be shown if no content is available for the desired language. However, there are exceptions for when there are language variants (en-US / en-GB, de-DE / de-CH, es-CO / es-MX / es-ES). In these exceptional cases, there are fallbacks in both directions: en-GB <> en-US
• To create a setting without any fallback language for different languages there are additional configurations required by using languageFallback. This is mainly the case for languages with language variants (en-US / en-GB, de-DE / de-CH) when globalLanguageFallback=null is not considered.

Defining the Custom Fallback Language

You can customize the fallback languages with an URL-encoded JSON_DATA string.

Steps to follow

1. Prepare the data in JSON format (JSON_DATA) – use double quotes (“).
2. The JSON format needs to be URI-encoded.
   You can use the developer tools in your web browser for encoding (shortcut: F12 key).
   In the Console tab, run this command:
   var uri = “{JSON_DATA}”; encodeURIComponent(uri)
3. Copy the output and use it in the Web Assistant parameter field:
   languageFallback= …

Example:

You want to change the fallback language for English (Australia) to English (United Kingdom),
and French (Belgium) to French (France) and French (Canada).

1. JSON_DATA = {“en-AU”:[“en-GB”],”fr-BE”:[“fr-FR”,”fr-CA”]}
2. var uri = “{“en-AU”:[“en-GB”],”fr-BE”:[“fr-FR”,”fr-CA”]}”; encodeURIComponent(uri)
3. languageFallback=%7B%22en-AU%22%3A%5B%22en-GB%22%5D%2C%22fr-BE%22%3A%5B%22fr-FR%22%2C%22fr-CA%22%5D%7D;

Show multiple languages

This feature is new with release 3.0.4 (preview on 07.06.2021). Use the parameter mixedLanguages to define whether the help panel learning tab only shows learning content for a single language or also content in other languages.

mixedLanguage=true (default value)

• The learning tab will show matching content in all defined languages (user language + fallback languages).
• Duplicates are removed (if the content was duplicated to create a translated variant). This means that each content item is only displayed once, in the best matching language.

mixedLanguages=false

• The learning tab will display the content for only one language from the preferred list.
• User language and fallback languages are checked in the specified order, and the first match will be used for all content objects.

Please note: This parameter has no effect in the Learning Center, which always shows all available learning content in all languages.

Summary

With different translation options, SAP Enable Now gives you the tools you need to be ready for global deployment. Especially machine translation with SAP Translation Hub is an effective and efficient way to streamline the translation process.

Additionally, the new custom fallback language option for Web Assistant gives you greater flexibility in setting up your languages in different target applications.

If you want to know more about the translation process, check out our Live Events on the main community page or watch the recorded Webinar.

Hope you enjoyed and learned something. Take care!

Kristina