How to Automatically Translate Your Survey

Last Updated: 15 Jun 2017Hits: 4563
Is there a way to automatically translate a survey into various languages?

Yes and no. Yes, if you are doing a online survey with a word-by-word translation using a translation service, such as Google Translate. No, if you want it to always make sense in the translated language.

While automatic translation services such as Google Translate are becoming increasingly robust as people submit "corrections" to common words and phrases, without actually using a manual translation service, some questions and their responses may lose their context, particularly if using non-standardized words or phrases.

To use Google Translate to allow a respondent to choose a language from a drop-down box and have the content of the page automatically translate, you could use the following code:

<div id="google_translate_element"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
 function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
   &emsppageLanguage: 'en',
   layout: google.translate.TranslateElement.InlineLayout.HORIZONTAL
  }, 'google_translate_element');
 }
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="//translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

Just copy that code and place it in your survey's Survey Settings > Headers & Footers > HTML <Head> Tag section and watch the magic happen! If you don't want text to be translated, you can style it with a class of "notranslate".