DatStat Illume offers an optional translation module plug-in allows you to display your existing surveys in over 100 languages. Translation-enabled Illume is designed to work with your third-party translation vendors or in-house translators to design and run surveys in various languages.
The translation package offers the ultimate in survey flexibility. It streamlines workflow, maintains the integrity of your survey design and ultimately allows you to launch a single survey to a multilingual audience or create multiple surveys for each region and language, enabling you to capture audience-specific data. This allows you to remove language barriers and reach your entire audience while seamlessly gathering clean, meaningful data.
Out translation module saves you time and money. When the translation file is being created, our technology identifies multiple occurrences of the same string or set of words and only records it once for translation. Because translation vendors charge per string, you save big by only having to pay for each unique string once. DatStat also offers the convenience of letting your flag strings that you do not wish to translate – like product names or proper names – saving you time and hassles.
How the Translation Module Works
The basic process for translating an Illume survey involves three steps:
- Create a translation package. This is a simple point-and-click operation that creates a “translation package”, which is an XML file containing all of the text from your Illume survey.
- Translate the package. Send the XML file to a third-party translation service.
- Import the translated text back into the original survey.
After step 3, your survey will contain both the original language and the translation. You may repeat this process for as many languages as needed, storing all of the translations in a single survey. When a participant begins a survey, Illume presents the most appropriate translation for that participant, and all of the text of the survey appears in the language of the selected translation.
You may also choose to save each of the translations as a separate survey. The disadvantage to the separate survey approach is that when you want to compare responses across all languages, you will have to take the extra step of building a cross survey view that includes each of the individual surveys.
Understanding the Default Language
All Illume surveys have a “default language.” Participants will see the entire survey in the default language if there is no other translation is selected. In addition, any un-translated text within a specific translation will be displayed in the default language to prevent the text from appearing entirely blank. For example, if English is the survey’s default language, and the French translation contains no translation for the prompt of question #3, then the prompt for question #3 will appear in English while the participant is taking the French version of the survey. This is often desirable behavior for text providing the name of a product which is the same for all languages.