A multilingual survey is one survey with one set of responses, presented in each participant's language. You build it once in a base language, add the other languages, and translate the text — questions, answer options, emails and all. Responses land in the same table regardless of the language used, so analysis stays simple.
The distinction that trips people up is that adding a language and translating a language are two separate jobs. Adding a language creates an empty copy of every piece of text in the survey. Until someone fills those copies in, participants on that language quietly see the base language instead.
Open Settings (the gear in the left icon rail) → General. Two fields matter:
Some languages offer variants — typing "German" offers German, German (easy) and German (informal) — so you can address participants formally or in plain language. The setting saves on its own.
Add your languages before you start translating, and ideally before activation. Everything you translate afterwards is extra work if the language set changes. Set the base language first too: it is the column your translators work from, so changing it mid-project means rethinking what has already been written.
The languages available to you can be restricted by your administrator. If one you need is missing, ask them to enable it.
Build the whole questionnaire in your base language before you translate. Translating while the wording is still moving means paying for the same sentence twice.
Once a survey has at least two languages, you have two ways to translate. Both write to the same place.
A language switcher appears at the top centre of the editor canvas (the 文A dropdown). Pick a language and the canvas shows that language's content — edit questions, answer options and screens inline exactly as you did in the base language. Good for a quick fix, for a two-language survey with a handful of questions, or when you are translating as you build.
Click the Translations icon (文A) in the left icon rail. This is the screen to use for real translation work: it walks you through every translatable string in a structured way, so nothing is missed in a long survey.
The icon stays inert until a second language exists — hovering shows "Quick translation: Currently there are no additional languages configured for this survey." If you see that, go back to step 1.
Inside, pick your target from the Translate to: dropdown. Each tab shows two columns — your base-language text on the left, an editable rich-text field on the right — so a translator can work through the survey without touching survey logic.
| Tab | What you translate |
|---|---|
| Survey title and description | Survey name and description |
| Welcome and end text | Welcome message and end message |
| Question groups | Group titles and descriptions |
| Questions | Question text and help text |
| Subquestions | Subquestion text |
| Answer options | Answer option labels |
| Invitation email subject | Invitation subject and body |
| Reminder email subject | Reminder subject and body |
| Confirmation email subject | Confirmation subject and body |
| Registration email subject | Registration subject and body |
| Basic admin notification subject | Basic notification subject and body |
| Detailed admin notification subject | Detailed notification subject and body |
The six email tabs are labelled "…subject", but each one holds the subject field and the full message body underneath it. It is easy to translate the subject, scroll past the body and think the tab is done. Email bodies are the most commonly missed content in the whole survey.
This screen has a Save button and does not autosave. The survey canvas saves by itself; Quick translation does not — click Save before you switch tabs or leave the screen, or the work is lost. It is the single most common way to lose an afternoon of translating.
There is also an Auto Translate button, which fills the target column using machine translation. Treat it as a first draft to correct, never as a finished translation — it has no idea that "Fair" is a scale point rather than an adjective, or that a term is a term of art in your field.
Some text lives in its own panel and is translated there, one language at a time. The clearest example is the privacy policy: Settings → Privacy policy has its own Language dropdown, and the policy message, error message and checkbox label are translated per language in that panel.
The rule of thumb: if you cannot find a piece of text in Quick translation, open the panel it belongs to and switch that panel's language selector.
&lang=de to the survey link to open it directly in that language. Use this when you already know the recipient's language.Untranslated strings fall back to the base language, silently. That is a safety net, not a result: a German participant meeting three English answer options will assume the survey is broken. A half-translated survey looks finished from the admin side, so previewing each language end to end is the only real check.
Three things to look for:
language column). Set it, and each participant's invitation and survey open in their language automatically. This is the cleanest option for closed-access surveys.startlanguage), so you can filter or cross-tabulate by language version.1.234,56 rather than 1,234.56.{FIRSTNAME} must stay {FIRSTNAME} in every version; translating what's inside the braces breaks the replacement.