Multi-language surveys

Mindful Feedback can play voice and text prompts in over 120 different languages. Which language to use for a given prompt is evaluated every time the prompt is to be presented by referring to the Respondent Language survey attribute. This article details the process of setting up different sets of questions for different languages within a single survey.

Using Multiple Languages

On the Survey Management page, you can configure alternative question text and audio files for any of the supported languages. First, select a language from the Language dropdown menu near the top-left corner of the page. With a particular language or dialect selected, you can then provide alternative text and audio for that language or dialect. When switching between languages in the dropdown menu, the prompts (text and voice) of the survey will change to the value for the selected language.

Which Prompts Are Used?

When a survey is executing, the prompt to play is chosen hierarchically based on the configured languages:

First, Feedback will attempt to find prompts configured for the language specified in the Respondent Language attribute (if present). For example, if Español (Chile) is specified, it will look for prompts configured for that particular dialect.
If nothing is found for the Respondent Language, and the Respondent Language is a dialect of a major language group, Feedback will next look for prompts configured for the major language (for example, if nothing is found for Español (Chile), the system will next look at the Español base language to see if any prompts are configured there).
If nothing is found for the base language (when applicable), the prompts assigned to the Default language will be used.

When a language is selected on the Survey Management page, you will see what prompt will be played for that language in the prompt fields (either in black or grey text depending on whether it is using a direct language definition or a fallback language).

Below you can see that the Español (Chile) dialect is selected, but the Question Prompt shows gray text. This indicates that nothing is configured for the Español (Chile) dialect, and the prompts are being taken from either the Español base language or the Default language.

image of the Language drop down with the Español Chile dialect selected

Below you can see that the Question Prompt text is black with the Español base language selected. This indicates that the prompts come directly from the Español base language.

image of the Language drop down with Español selected

As can be seen here, if the survey Respondent Language is set to Español (Chile) or just Español, it will still present the same Spanish text for the Helpfulness question.

Note:

For voice surveys, if no audio file is present for a particular prompt, Feedback will play the text question via text-to-speech.
SMS responses to a Yes/No question will expect the Yes/No to be in the language of the Respondent Language setting for the survey. For example, if the Respondent Language is set to Dansk (Danish) then it would expect the respondent to answer "Ja" for Yes and "Nej" for No.

Common Use Case: Setting a Language During a Survey

If you know that your survey respondent may wish to conduct the survey in a language other than English then you could offer the respondent a choice at the beginning of the survey. For example, your first question could ask the respondent to choose a language and then the survey can use Triggers and events to set the language based on the response. The rest of the survey would then be conducted in the chosen language.

The screen below shows the configuration of a language selection question. This configuration assumes that English is the default language for the survey.

image of the Question screen showing the configuration of a language selection question

Here is a summary of the configuration:

A Number question is used with a max response of 2.
The question Reporting has been turned Off, meaning that the question will not be shown in the reporting. (not shown in image).
Over SMS the prompt includes instructions on how to respond
Over the web the question scale label will show the respondent how to respond (not shown in image).
Over voice - the selected voice file would include instructions
If the response to the question is 2 then the trigger sets the Respondent Language attribute of the survey to Spanish. The Spanish prompts will be played for the remainder of the survey.