Multilanguage survey

Survey Building
1

Hi,

I am starting the implement my survey in SurveyEngine. How can I first start the survey with the following question: Please choose the language you would like to use to complete this survey: o Nederlands, o Francais, o English

Depending on the language participants select, the survey will be in the selected language.

How to design this multilanguage design in 1 survey?

Thank you in advance.

2

This is more about management than features. So consider the following.
Do you want one data set to manage?
Is this purely a user preference or are there impacts on the data analysis?
Do you want to allocate experiment scenarios within or across languages?
How likely is the survey to change post first draft.

The answers to each of these will dictate how you set up your study.

In the most Naive interpretation - it’s just user preference and every data item perfectly matches each other irregardless of language (unlikely) then the management issue is one of change. What you want to avoid is having to track changes in parallel across 3 languages.

Here is the best practice at SurveyEngine.

  1. Define and complete your survey in a single reference language - usually English. Get this working in logic and signed off by the stakeholders.
  2. Export the codeplan as excel - do the translations offline and upload as new surveys.
  3. Then have a single ‘router’ survey that asks the preference and then directs them to the relevant language survey. You may need to chain id’s if you are using a panel - pretty easy.

this has the advantage of independent surveys , correct signoff flow - but strata management is more difficult. You also need to stitch the data together at the end.

The alternative is to do all the languages in one survey and this is best done again from a one language reference starting point

  1. Get the reference version signed off
  2. Export the entire reference survey as a codeplanc
  3. Make your translations in the codeplan - this time sequentially - literally copy and paste the rows - keeping the same data labels
  4. re-import and add a simple language preference question that branches to the correct language

This is more brittle, and SurveyEngine will complain about duplicate lables, - but you have one data set, one set of quota controls and can still regionalise within each language if required.

3

Hello,

I have a similar question. I am setting up a multilingual survey in which participants choose their preferred language in the first question. The survey is coded so that participants only see the questions in their language of choice. However, the experiment itself is only set up in one language. Is it possible for the experiment to be translated and shown to participants in the right language, without having to include multiple experiments?

Thank you in advance.

4

Mira,
Great question. There are a couple of options and it really has to do with method rather than tech.

Operationally most researchers separate the data collection by language as there is almost never a perfect one-to-one relationship between languages. Separating also allows better strata control.

Here’s what is best practice.

  1. Decide on a reference langauge (usually English)
  2. Get the entire survey signed off, never to be changed
  3. Perform the translation(s) on the reference version - using download/upload codeplan option
  4. Make customer regionalisations separately.
  5. Treat each as separate data collection streams

If you just want to ‘make it easier’ for the respondent. Then perhaps the best is to

  1. Generate a preferred language question, say ‘lang’ (1 = english, 2 = swahili etc)
  2. Create the survey in your reference language and get it signed off (as above)
  3. Duplicate every question/experiment for the new language - but retain the same question label (e.g. q1 for English and q1 for Swhili)
  4. Add the lang condition to each question e.g. $lang ==1 for the English question, $lang==2 for Swahili etc
  5. Ignore warnings about duplicate data labels when you publish as this is intentional

This may look like a bit more work - but this will be a godsend when (inevitably) regionalisation or cultural sensitivities come into play as you can customise freely.

The key takeawy here is signoff management - bolt down your reference version and don’t change it - then move to translations and regionalisation.

I hope this helps and welcome to the forum!
Ben