Language Asset Management

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Language Asset Management

    Language Asset Management in Localization Workspace enhances instance localization by enabling you to upload, store, and edit glossaries. Glossaries are lists of source terms with translations into multiple languages, facilitating consistent and context-sensitive translations across your organization.

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    Key Features

    • Glossary Management: Create multiple glossaries organized by business unit, function, or locale. Each glossary can be subdivided or filtered by Product/Service category.
    • Contextual Translation: Source terms can appear under different categories, allowing distinct translations depending on context.
    • Multilingual Support: Provide translations for any language in the syslanguage table, including self-localized and inactive languages (inactive languages are excluded from translation workflows).
    • Spreadsheet Template: Use the provided ServiceNowGlossaryTemplate.xlsx for glossary creation and uploads. It supports all ServiceNow AI Platform languages and self-localized languages by adding columns with language codes from syslanguage.
    • Editing and Exporting: Edit glossaries directly in the UI and export them as CSV or spreadsheet files to share with stakeholders or translation providers.
    • Language Activation: Activate languages by installing language plugins or create custom language records for unsupported languages.

    Practical Guidance

    • Plan glossaries to align with your organizational structure and translation needs.
    • Each glossary can contain between 50 and 1500 rows as a general guideline.
    • Do not modify header rows for certain supported languages (Brazilian Portuguese, French-Canada, Traditional Chinese) to ensure proper import mapping.
    • Leave translation fields blank for languages you do not intend to use.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By using Language Asset Management, customers can centrally manage terminology and translations, ensuring accuracy and consistency across localized content. The ability to handle multiple glossaries and contextual translations helps tailor language assets to specific business units or locales, improving communication clarity and user experience in multilingual environments.

    Enhance localization in your instance with Language Asset Management in Localization Workspace. You can upload glossaries to Language Asset Management for editing and storage.

    Glossaries in Language Asset Management

    From version 3.0.0, the Language Asset Management area of Localization Workspace enables you to upload glossaries, which are lists of terms with translations that you provide. Each source term in a glossary can have translations into multiple languages. You can create multiple glossaries. In the Australia release, glossaries are available for storage and editing only.

    When planning your glossary assets, consider the following points.
    • You can have more than one glossary in Language Asset Management, so you can organize your glossaries according to business unit, function, or locale.
    • Each glossary can be subdivided or filtered using the Product/Service category.
    • One source term can be listed under different Product/Service or Part of Speech categories. A source term repeated in two different categories is considered to be two different records, so different translations can be assigned to each occurrence of the term per category. This enables a term to be translated differently depending on the context.
    • Translations assigned to source terms can be provided for any language listed in the sys_language table, including self-localized languages.
    • The included spreadsheet template (ServiceNow_Glossary_Template.xlsx) must be used when creating a glossary. For details see Upload glossaries to Language Asset Management.
    • Any editing or modification to the contents of existing glossaries can be done in the UI. For details see Edit a glossary in Language Asset Management.
    • There is no upper limit to the number of rows in a glossary, but the general guideline is for each glossary to have between 50 and 1500 rows.

    In the spreadsheet template, columns are provided for all languages supported by ServiceNow AI Platform in the sys_language table. You don't need to provide translations for all languages. Clear out (leave blank) all values for any languages you don't plan to use. You can upload glossary translations for languages that are active = false in sys_language, but inactive languages are not available for translation workflows.

    You can include self-localized languages when uploading glossaries with the spreadsheet template. Create additional columns in the spreadsheet template for self-localized languages. For the label in the header row of the spreadsheet, use codes from the ID column of the sys_language table for the corresponding languages.
    Note:
    With the following supported languages, the import transform handles mapping of the spreadsheet's language code to the ID code in sys_language. Do not modify or update the header row of the spreadsheet template for these languages.
    • Brazilian Portuguese
    • French - Canada
    • Traditional Chinese
    To activate languages in sys_language, install language plugins. To self-localize an unsupported language, see Create a language record.