Multilingual Survey

If you want to run survey projects covering several countries, you can collect responses in multiple languages, while seeing the aggregated results in the same dashboard.

This also means that you can aggregate both your quantitative and qualitative data even if it has been submitted in multiple languages. You can use the same coherent labeling structure for all multilingual surveys as well: Zurvey.io can quantify results and make them comparable in different languages using this coherent categorization (read more about this here).

To activate the feature, create a survey or open any of your existing ones, and switch on the Multilingual Survey toggle in the sidebar. This will turn the current analysis language into the benchmark language of the survey, which will act as the source language of the translations.

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Important note: In Multilingual Surveys, the benchmark language is the source language for your translations. If you publish and activate translations that have missing fields, this language is the fallback. Activating the multilingual survey feature will also make a new tab appear at the top: translations.

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On the translation tab, you can select the languages you want to translate your survey to (the benchmark language is already selected with a disabled checkbox).

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In this example, we’ll create a multilingual survey with English as its benchmark language and German and Czech as the two other additional languages that the survey will be displayed in.

After all desired languages are selected, you can save your settings by clicking on the save button below and go to the next phase of the translation process, where you need to add the translations to the survey questions (and all other elements of the survey, such as the thank you page, disqualification pages, or explanation texts) one by one. If a mistake is made, there is a reset to the previous state button. You can switch between the selected languages using the dropdown menu at the top, which also shows the completion rate of the translations. Progress should be saved by clicking the save button, otherwise, changes will be lost.

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Finally, if all translations have been added, you need to publish the translated elements by clicking the “Publish” button, and activate the added languages on the overview tab. There, you can see all finished translations, and if you’ve missed anything that should be added.

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Keep in mind that you can switch the Multilingual Survey toggle on and off without losing your translations, but removing a language on the Translations tab or deleting a question will result in the loss of those translations.

If you activate the translation with missing fields for any language, the missing fields will appear in your benchmark language. Published changes will be visible once you activate the translation in the Overview.

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Distribute a multilingual survey

After translations are completed, you can distribute your surveys by going to the next phase, the publish page. Publish pages for multilingual surveys are similar to normal surveys, except for one extra setting that appears: language coded URLs.

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Here, you can see the individual links for each version of the survey for each language added to the survey. You can send the specific link to respondents so that they receive the survey in the given language. Links can be copied one by one or if multiple languages are added, all links can be exported in an .xlsx file.

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What will survey respondents see?

By default, the survey is displayed in the benchmark language, but respondents can change it to any of the available translations using a drop-down menu at the top right corner.

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However, if you already know what language your respondents will want to use, you can share a specific translation with them, using the aforementioned automatically generated URLs that contain the language code.

Once you start receiving survey responses in various languages, you will see on the dashboard that an extra filtering option has become available. While the default is to display results from all languages together in all charts, you can filter for the specific language(s) you want to see, just like you would with any other dimension. This can be done separately for each of the open-ended questions added to the survey (as all open format questions have a separate text analysis dashboard section).


Read more about this feature on our blog:

Create multilingual surveys in Zurvey.io