Tutorial: How to Create a Multi-Lingual Survey

With SurveyGizmo, it ’s easy to create a survey in many languages. Then you can combine all the results into one report.

Here’s how to make your multi-lingual survey:

1. Create your first survey in whatever language you want to see combined results in. For our example, let’s say we want to see all of our results in English.
2. Make sure you have all of your questions finalized just how you want to publish your survey.
3. When the first survey is final, copy it and start a new survey.
4. Translate each question into the new language.
5. IMPORTANT: Leave all the reporting values alone. Don’t change any reporting values. This is important so that your reports can aggregate all of the data from each question in all the languages.
6. If you want to do a third survey in a different language, go back to the original English survey, copy it and start a new survey.
7. Translate the questions into the third language, leaving the reporting values untouched.
8. Repeat copying, creating a new survey and translating the questions for as many languages as you like.
9. Publish your surveys.

You can run Combined Reports to see all of the results in one report. You can run Summary Reports on each individual survey as well.

If you want to allow respondents to choose their language:

Sometimes you may not know in advance what language a particular respondent speaks, so you would like to ask them first, then redirect them to the correct survey. Here’s how to do this:

1. Create a new survey that just has a single multiple choice question: “Choose your language”



2. Go to the individual language surveys you created above, click the Publish tab and copy one of the links to the survey. (You will need to launch the survey before you can see the links.) Do this for all languages and save the links in a text file to use in the steps below.
3. On the thank-you page of the choose-your-language survey, create a redirect for each language. Do this by clicking Add Actions at the top of the thank-you page. These will redirect the respondent to the appropriate survey based on the answer they gave above. Give each redirect a meaningful name such as “Redirect to English” and “Redirect to Spanish.”
4. Here’s where it gets a little tricky. For each redirect, select “Yes” for the “Redirect by Default” option. You will now need to add a rule that suppresses the redirect under certain conditions. You do this by using a merge code syntax for the question that asks which language. If you only created one question, the merge code will be “[%%1:%%]” (without the quotes).
5. Enter a rule that looks something like this:

   '[%%1:%%]' != 'Spanish'

   This means “Suppress this redirect if the answer given to question number 1 is not equal ‘Spanish’.” (More information about writing these kinds of rules is in our tutorial about Advanced Rule Writing)

   
   

6. Repeat this for each language redirect you set up, taking care to make sure each redirect points to a different survey.
7. Save your changes and publish this survey. You can test it by going to the survey and selecting each language in turn.