If you have a multi-stage survey (one where a survey is broken into two or more shorter surveys because they need to have different anonymity settings, for instance), that you also need to present in multiple languages, then it can be challenging to make the respondent experience totally seamless. By default, your respondents will need to re-select a language when they move from the first survey to the second.
What’s needed is a way of passing the language selection from one survey into another, which is what this guide will explain.
The Language Piping Tag
One of the key components of how to achieve this is the fact that the respondent’s selected language is something that can be used as a piping tag. You can select it from the piping menu as “Language” or use the tag [survey(lang)]. This will output the selected language as a two-character code, using the ISO 639-1 standard (external link).
Implementation
What you need to do is, on the second survey, create a specific tracking link for each language. We will assume that you have already entered your translations for both your surveys. There a couple of things to watch out for.
- Firstly, remember that you will need to change the “End survey” button text to the equivalent of “next page” for all your translations on the first survey.
- Secondly, on the translations setting screen of the second survey, you should set the language selection option to “none” or “Load Default Language - Selection drop down at top right of screen”
To create your tracking links, follow the instructions in this linked guide: Creating Tracking Links for specific languages.
Once you have created your links, you need to give them custom links. These links should be identical, apart from the last two characters, where you should use the language code for that link’s selected language.
For example, for a survey that we are running in English and French:
www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/translated-survey-en
www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/translated-survey-fr
Repeat this as many times as is necessary for all your languages. If you don’t know the codes, a full list can be found here, and a list of some of the most common ones is below:
| Language |
Code |
| English |
en |
| French |
fr |
| German |
de |
| Spanish |
es |
| Italian |
it |
| Arabic |
ar |
| Welsh |
cy |
| Chinese |
ch |
| Dutch |
nl |
| Turkish |
tr |
Then, on the first survey, you need to access the survey finish settings and set the end survey redirect to one of the links you’ve created, replacing the last two characters with the language piping tag as below:
https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/translated-survey-[survey(lang)]
And that’s all you need to do.
We’ve created an example survey at the below link Where you can see it in action. Pay attention to the Site URL in the browser bar as you move from “page 1” to “page 2”.
https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/Translated-survey-part-1/