Translating Your Survey
In this article:
- Introducing translation.
- Changing your survey's language.
- Translating to multiple languages.
- Creating a custom translation.
- Available languages.
FAQs
- What parts of my survey can be translated?
- Can I translate my Additional Questions?
- Why isn't the language I want to add listed in the Translations tool?
Introducing translation
Delighted makes it easy to translate your survey! You can use one of our three dozen languages as your default translation, or customize your own translation to fit your needs. You can also stick with one single translation within a project, or translate your survey dynamically based on the recipient. We call these language translations “locales.”
Changing your survey's language
Update the survey language from within the “Customize appearance” page for each platform. This will translate the survey to the newly selected language for all recipients. To do this:
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- Click on “Survey people.”
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- Choose the gear icon to the right of your desired platform.
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- Click “Customize appearance.”
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- Open the header titled “Advanced customization.”
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- Choose the desired language from the dropdown list.
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- Click “Save changes.”
Translating to multiple languages
Translating your survey is nice, but what if some recipients should receive the survey in one language, and other recipients should receive the survey in another? No need to create a new project to translate to multiple languages—simply pass the locale Special Property!
For example, you’d use locale = fr to send your survey to Adele in French, and locale = es to send your survey to Andres in Spanish! You can read all about Special Properties and how to pass them in this article.
Creating a custom translation
You may want to tweak a translation we provide so that it better aligns with your survey needs. This is possible using our Translations tool.
The ability to build custom locales with the Translations tool is a premium feature, available only on certain plans. For full information, check out our Pricing page.
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Open up the Project-level settings in the Project's drop-down menu and select the "Edit Translations" button.
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Click “+Add a new language” and choose the survey language you'd like to edit.
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Type over the default translation to adjust it.
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Click "Save" when you're finished!
If you’re just using one language, you can edit this translation from within the Survey customization page—no need to use the Translations tool! This tool is only necessary to translate secondary versions of the survey across multiple languages.
Say you adjust the Spanish translation for your survey. Now, when you pass the “es” value in the locale Special Property, your survey will be translated using your custom translation!
Exporting and importing custom translations
You can also create custom translations outside of Delighted and import them into the platform (for example, to use an external translation service). To do this:
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- Navigate to the Translations tool using the same process as above.
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- Click “+Add a new language” and select the language you want to translate.
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- Click “Export as Excel.”
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- Edit the translation as desired and save the updated file.
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- Back in the Delighted Translations tool, make sure your desired language is selected and click “Import” at the top of the page.
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- You’ll see your custom translation applied. Don’t forget to click “Save”!
Available languages
We currently support over three dozen languages:
| Language | Locale | Language | Locale |
| Arabic Bulgarian Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional, Hong Kong) Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Finnish French Georgian German Greek Hebrew Hungarian Indonesian |
ar bg zh-CN zh-HK zh-TW hr cs da nl en et fi fr ka de el he hu id |
Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Malaysian Norwegian Bokmål Polish Portuguese (Brazil) Portuguese (Portugal) Romanian Russian Serbian Spanish Swedish Thai Turkish Vietnamese |
it ja ko lv lt ms nb pl pt-BR pt ro ru sr es sv th tr vi |
We use the ISO 639-1 codes for each language as the locale value. You can also find the full list of the languages and their associated language codes in the Advanced Customization section of any survey customization page.
What parts of my survey can be translated?
When you change the language of your survey, the entire survey-taker experience will be updated to the new language, from the scale labels to the Thank you page. However, any parts of the survey that you have added or customized, such as Additional Questions, will need to be translated manually using the Translations tool.
Can I translate my Additional Questions?
Yes! After adding Additional Questions to your survey, you’ll see them appear in the Translations tool as a field to edit when adding a new language.
Why isn't the language I want to add listed in the Translations tool?
The Translations tool is designed to help you edit secondary languages for your survey. If the language you’re trying to customize (say, the Polish translation) is set as the selected language for any of your survey platforms, it will only be available for customization on the survey customization page.
In other words, to edit a translation using the Translations tool, it can’t be set as the selected language for any platform in that project. Keep in mind that you might have selected a different language for each distribution platform.