The Translation module for the DatStat Platform allows you to program surveys in multiple languages to cater the needs of your population.
Notice that the word “No” appears in the Translate column to the left of this string, which has been removed for translation. If the user changes their mind, they can select the item again from the list of translatable strings and click “Restore to Translation”.
The two options below are mutually exclusive:
The Translation package contains every unique string of text found in your survey, including the text of question prompts, response options, instructions, error messages, button labels, HTML resources, etc. Each unique text string is included only once in the Translation package, regardless of how many times it appears in the survey. For example, if 20 different questions include the response option “I choose not to answer”, the text string “I choose not to answer” appears only once in the translation package. It will be translated once, and when the translation package is imported back into the survey, every instance of the text string “I choose not to answer” will be replaced by the same bit of translated text. This saves time and money by sparing translators from having to translate the same text multiple times. The “Translatable Strings” list includes the following columns:
The text count at the bottom of the Translation Package window shows the total number of non-unique text strings in the entire survey, the total number of unique strings, and the total number of strings in the translation package.
The number of strings in the package will be equal to the total number of unique strings in the survey, minus any strings you marked for exclusion.
There are two options for translating the package:
To translate a survey using Illume’s Translation tool, a Translation package must first be created, as described in “Creating a Translation Package”. Once the Translation package has been created, follow these steps to open the translation editor:
The Translation editor displays the contents of the Translation package, and provides features for translating text while maintaining attributes such as font color, bold-face and underlined text.
The bottom half of the Translation editor displays all of the unique text strings in the source language. Translations appear to the right of the source language strings, in green type.
To translate text from the source language to the translation language:
NOTE: If formatting is lost while editing the translation, simply highlight the text and use the buttons beneath the Text/HTML editor to re-apply formatting. Note that the original text, with formatting, is always displayed in the top left editor.
Once the xml that was sent to a third-party translation service and it has been received, or the language(s) have been inserted using the Translation Tool, the package may be reincorporated into the survey.
Once the Translation Package has be added to the Master Survey further editing can take place in any language that the survey contains.
When working on a survey in multiple languages it is possible to move between the languages to maintain the context of the translation.
NOTE: Any edits made in the selected language will be saved when the survey is saved.
Once the survey has been translated and reviewed a new, or additional, Question or Text Item may needed. The ability to move between languages in a single Object will allow it to be translated without having to create a Translation Package.
Launching the specific language of a multilingual survey can be accomplished by appending the 4 digit LCID or the character based LCID to the end of the URL, e.g.
The Data Dictionary item “DATSTAT.LANGUAGE” will store the language of the survey taken by the participant.
A web language selection page allows respondents to select their desired language from a presented set of languages, and have the survey redirect to that desired language.
To create a web language selection page, you must first obtain the URLs associated to each language, as noted above in “Launching a Specific Language”. Every language has a unique LCID that can be appended to the survey URL to specify a specific language URL.
A text object may be placed at the start of a survey with hyperlinks to each language. The URLs must append:
When the respondent clicks the link, he will resume on the language selection page and must click Next to move forward into the desired language. You may consider adding text to the language selection page to instruct this fact. Note: If the survey is to be launched offline, using the Remote Data Collection module, then the Survey URLs must be the RDC offline URLs as opposed to the web URLs.
Illume 6.1 supports two templates, Default and Responsive, and each template handles buttons in a different manner. When using the Responsive template, the buttons are dynamically generated. Different text can be provided per language for appropriate button display. When in Survey – Preferences – Buttons, select the appropriate language from the language drop-down, and enter the desired button text in the Button Text field as shown below:
When using the Default Template, survey buttons are bitmap images, thus to have buttons appear in a different language, new buttons must be created and imported as Resources. There are many free button-creator websites available for creating your alternate-language buttons.
Below are the ‘Next’, ‘Previous’, and ‘Submit’ buttons for a Spanish survey, which will be used as examples for the remainder of this section. Follow the steps below to include them in your survey.
Follow the steps below to create parameters for these types of questions.
In a single language survey, the text would be typed out within the set-up of the multi-control question. However, we will be using parameters to insert this text in. This is how the above question is set up:
Use {ParamValue:PARAMETERNAME} to insert the text. In this case, for the text ‘AGE’, the parameter name used is AGE. The ‘Years:’ and ‘Months:’ text are within AGEYR and AGEMO as the prompt/label before:
The Parameter Name is the name used within the {ParamValue:PARAMETERNAME} and Parameter Value is the text you want displayed. For the three parameters that were referenced in step 2, the following are the parameters for the age question:
Calculations are often used in Illume surveys as a means to produce text. For example, a question might ask:
“How many years have you lived in your current house with your baby/babies?”
The programmer may want to pipe the appropriate text (baby vs babies), depending on a prior question that asks the respondent how many babies they have. If they have more than one baby, then ‘babies’ should be piped and if they have one baby, then ‘baby’. Typically, a calculation to produce this text would be created of ‘text’ data type, and the calculation would be as follows:
{Value:BABYQ}==1? “baby” : “babies”
This example is for a question called BABYQ that would ask something to the effect of “How many babies do you have?” and the question would have response options of 1 = One baby and 2 = More than one baby. This method works successfully in single language surveys. However, if a survey is to be translated into multiple languages, there is no interface within the Calculations editor to put the translated text.
To ensure that all text in a survey is translated, including the text outputted in a calculation, the programmer should utilize a combination of Survey Parameters and Calculations.
Any text that might be changed due to language should be put in a Parameter (directions on this are in the multi-control question section). In this example, there would be two parameters, one to output the word ‘baby’ and another to output the word ‘babies’. These parameters can be called BABY and BABIES respectively. To pipe the appropriate text into the question prompt, the programmer will utilize the “DatStat.GetParameter” function. The above calculation (let’s assume this is called NUMBABIES) will now be:
({Value:BABYQ}==1)?DatStat.GetParameter(“BABY”): DatStat.GetParameter(“BABIES”)
The appropriate language will automatically be pulled into the calculation. This calculation can then be piped into the prompt of the BABYQ question as:
“How many years have you lived in your current house with your {Value:NUMBABIES}?”
If JavaScript is used for validation error messages, such as for alert or confirm messages, the error messages will need to be placed in parameters so that you may provide multiple language versions of each error message.
The message in an Email Job can be configured for multiple languages. The language sent to a specific Participant is based on the DATSTAT_LANGUAGE set for that Participant in the Participant List. To configure multiple languages for an email job:
When configuring the Email Message section of the email job, the Encoding selection is important as it must represent a character set that suits the language of the email message. The encoding choices are: