Multilingual Studies
Each Study can be configured with languages different from the site’s primary language. Options to enable multiple languages are accessed during study creation or via Study Settings> Configuration. This feature is only required when you need a single Study to operate in two or more languages at the same time with the same set of participants. To enable more than three languages to be visible to participants, please contact us to request a change.
Once enabled, you will see a language indicator that can be translated in each field. This indicator is visible only to the Study administrators. A language code appears, as shown, to remind you of the language being edited. The menu lets you switch quickly between the languages you have chosen to support. A green dot indicates that a translation has been provided for that field, making it easy to monitor your progress.
When Auto-Translations are enabled, study content will be automatically translated. For full details on how to use this feature, visit our Introduction to Auto-Translations article.
Multilingual Considerations
While most 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).
Even when you don’t plan to socialize responses among participants, this capability proves helpful as researchers can have a single Study to collect responses for distinct languages or regions. Participants may never realize that other languages are supported.
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). It’s always easier to separate and filter data than to try to combine it later.
The Fill the Blanks, Image Review and Video Review Tasks are the only Task Types not fully compatible with multilingual Study setups. Since the Response Template (i.e. where the blanks are located) cannot have multiple translations and 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).