Multilingual Studies

Each Study can be configured with a default language which differs from the site’s primary language. Multilingual support options are accessed via Study Settings > Configuration. By selecting Advanced Language Options below Default Language, a new drop-down will appear labeled Multilingual Support. Additional languages supported on the site will be shown. 

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 avoid technical issues that can occur with language support changes, only Recollective can update the Multilingual Support setting. Please contact us to request a change.

Once enabled, you will see a language indicator in each field that can be translated. This is only seen by the Study administrators. A language code appears as shown to remind you which language is being edited. A menu lets you quickly toggle between the languages you chose to support. A green dot indicates that a translation has been provided for that field so it’s easy to track your progress.

Multilingual Considerations

While most people participating in a multilingual Study might be bilingual, they are going to 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’s of course 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 useful as researchers can have a single Study to collect responses for distinct languages or regions. Participants may never realize 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 that are not fully compatible with multilingual Study setups. Since the Response Template (i.e. where the blanks are found) 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).