Knowledge field sizes: Issues and considerations

All Salesforce standard and custom fields have a maximum size or length. When you try to update these fields with data that exceeds this maximum size, it results in an error.

When you translate Knowledge articles with the Language I/O Article translation app, you may be notified by Language I/O that the translation project failed because some of the content exceeded the size of a particular field. This happens when the translated content is longer than the source content. Exceeding the maximum size of a field results in an error when Language I/O tries to update your Knowledge article translations. Language I/O will typically share the article number, field, and language where this error occurs to help you resolve the issue.

This article describes the possible solutions to prevent or correct this kind of issues.

Increase the size limit

Where possible, you can increase the character limit of the field to its maximum. For example, the "Text Area (Rich)" (HTML) field type has a default limit of 32,768 characters, but you can increase it to its maximum possible length of 131,072 characters. Consult your Salesforce administrator before making changes to Knowledge field sizes.

Change the field type

Where possible, you can change the field type to another that supports an larger maximum size. For example, instead of using the "Text" field, which has a 255 character limit, use "Text Area (Rich)" instead. You can combine this with an increase in size as described in the previous section to make sure you have as much room available as possible. Consult your Salesforce administrator before making changes to Knowledge field types.

Reduce the size of the content

If you changed size limits or field types but still run into issues with translation lengths, another solution is edit and reduce the length of the source content itself. Shorter source texts will result is shorter translations.

As a last resort if all of the above fails, Language I/O can manually downsize the translations to fit the field size. Contact your Customer Success Manager to find the best way to solve your issue.