Multilingual Surveys
You can create a multilingual survey with different language options by adding your own translations. With a single survey, your survey takers can choose the language they’re most comfortable with from a drop down menu. You can also send a link that automatically opens your survey to the selected language.
You can let survey takers choose their preferred language from a dropdown menu on the survey, or send a special link for each language that opens the survey in that language automatically.
It's easy to set up:
1. Finalize your survey design and collector options
2. Add a language
3. Download the translation file for that language
4. Add your own translations to the file
5. Upload the translated file to SurveyMonkey
Once you add a language to your survey, you can download the file and start working on your translations. These files are unique to each survey. If you make a copy of a survey, you will need to make a new translation file for that copy.
Your translation file includes text from the Design Survey and Collect Responses sections of your survey. Finalize all your text and settings in both places before adding another language to your survey. This helps keep your default language and your translations consistent.
To add a survey language:
Some languages have different dialects based on country or region. For these languages, you can click the + Locale option and choose the specific dialect or locale you'd like to provide translations for.
Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian text automatically displays in RTL orientation. We don't support other languages in RTL orientation.
Your downloaded .csv file may have pre-populated translations for default text in the Translated_Text (Modify this column only) column—you can choose to edit this text. Leave all other columns unchanged including Original Text, which is your survey text in the default language.
If you’re having issues with Excel or another spreadsheet program, try Google Spreadsheets. Download and save your file as Comma-Separated Values (.csv, current sheet).
To properly edit and translate your .csv file, follow the steps below. Errors may occur if you open or double-click the downloaded file.
To add translations using a .csv file on a Mac:
TIP! If you’re outside of the U.S., your computer preferences may be set to another region and cause Excel to use semicolons to separate text. To upload your files into SurveyMonkey, your Excel settings must use commas to separate text.
To add translations using a .csv file on a PC:
TIP! If you’re outside of the U.S., your computer preferences may be set to another region and cause Excel to use semicolons to separate text. To upload your files into SurveyMonkey, your Excel settings must use commas to separate text.
The other translation file is a PO format (with .po file extension), which is often used in specialized translation software to maintain translations on multilingual websites.
We recommend using translation software like Transifex or Poedit to translate the PO file in a more user-friendly interface. From there you can export the translated PO file, and upload it back into SurveyMonkey. You can also use your computer's text editor like Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac to open and edit the file.
When you open the PO file in a text editor, you'll see a lot of code—but don't worry! You don't need to know how to code in order to translate the file. You only need to focus on two parts:
| Keyword | Description |
| msgid | Your survey text, in the default language. |
| msgtr | The translation. |
Youll see msgid and msgstr repeated throughout the file for every piece of text that appears in your survey.
To add your translations to the file:
Here are a few excerpts from a PO file where the default survey language is English, and you're translating it to Spanish. These examples should help you understand how to read the PO file, and how to add your translations in the right place.
If you want to learn more about the PO file format, Pology is a great resource.
Once you save your translated file, go back to SurveyMonkey and upload the translations to your survey.
To upload your translated file to SurveyMonkey:
Learn how to manage existing languages and translations you've added to your survey.
You can send a multilingual survey with any collector type, but we recommend the Web Link collector because you can send people directly to a specific language version of your survey by using language links.
A language link will open the survey with the specified language automatically selected, so people taking your survey don't need to select their preferred language from the dropdown themselves. This is a great option if you plan on sending your survey to different language cohorts separately.
The base URL of each language link is the same as the main survey link, so using language links doesn't create separate collectors. All your responses will still be associated with the same collector.
To get a language link:
If you send your multilingual survey using a different collector type, there may be elements that you can't translate. Your survey is sent in the default language and survey takers can choose their preferred language from the dropdown.
When you analyze your results, all the responses across languages are merged together as one single data set. Throughout your results, the question text and answer choices will show in the default survey language, but they represent all responses to your survey—regardless of what language the survey taker selected.
When you export responses, the question and answer text are in your default survey language. If you want to see responses based on what language people took the survey in, you can filter by language.
To see which language each respondent used to take the survey view the Individual Responses section, or export All Responses Data in XLS or SPSS format.