Multilingual Studies
During study setup, each Study can be configured with languages different from the site’s primary language. A single study can support multiple languages, which is useful when researchers wish to run a multi-market project within a single study space, or when the same group of participants needs to choose their preferred language. For example, if you are required to provide participants with the option to read and respond in either of their country’s official languages, a multilingual study allows for this flexibility.
More information on how to configure study languages can be found here.
Once multiple Study Languages have been enabled for a single study, Automatic Translations will be enabled by default. Study content will be automatically translated, with supported fields indicated by a language picker in the bottom right corner. This language picker appears when creating activities, tasks, and discussions, showing the supported Study Languages visible to all or visible exclusively to Admins.
When new content is added in the source language—the initial language that drives all translations—updates are automatically re-processed and displayed in all supported languages.
If more than one Participant Language is selected within a single study space, Automatic Translations will also become available for participants. When enabled, participants can view all study responses, discussions, comments, replies and email notifications–from both Admins and other participants–in their preferred language automatically, making it easier to follow, contribute to, and understand study content, no matter the language.
Multilingual Considerations
While many people participating in a multilingual study might be bilingual, they will prefer reading and responding in their native language. This maximizes what you can get from each respondent without the confusion or clutter of duplicated text.
We can think of many Canadian applications for English / French Studies and American Studies in English / Spanish. There are countless language combinations in Europe, Asia and beyond (and you can activate more than two languages at a time).
The platform’s multilingual capability also proves helpful as researchers can have a single Study to collect responses for distinct languages or regions, without needing to sacrifice a socialized setup.
Since all responses will now be consolidated for analysis, there’s considerably less work to synthesize results, especially for complex data that one gets from Sort and Rank and Grid Tasks. You can, of course, Segment participants based on their language or region if you want to filter results (e.g. to generate an English-only word cloud), as it’s easier to separate and filter data than to try to combine it later.
The Image Review and Video Review Tasks are the only Task Types not fully compatible with multilingual Study setups. Since you cannot upload two separate images or videos, you must instead have multiple versions of the same Task with limited visibility tied to corresponding language Segments (and translated content therein).