True Multilingual Support

The world is indeed becoming a smaller and smaller place and so Recollective has again expanded its international reach and appeal by adding true multilingual support to its platform. We’ve always supported multiple languages for the interface, but it’s now possible for researchers to input translated text into the same field, on same form, and have Recollective automatically personalize the experience for each participant. True multilingual support avoids the unwanted clutter of duplicated introductions, instructions and labels. It ultimately streamlines the experience, improves usability and thus boosts response rates. It also ensures that cloning studies for translation is no longer necessary. You can avoid splitting up study participants based on language when every voice should be heard together. This is particularly relevant in geographies that have more than one official language. Recollective’s new multilingual capability applies to all key areas, including the site name, study name, screening questions, study overview, activities, tasks, discussions and more. Every aspect of the participant experience can be experienced in the person’s native language with freedom to even switch languages at will.

Enabling Multilingual Support

Each study can now be configured with a default language which differs from the site’s primary language. To enable multilingual support, simply visit Study Settings and then select Basic Configuration. By selecting “Advanced Options” below Default Language, a new drop-down will appear labeled Multilingual Support. From here you select the additional languages you plan to support in that study. Once enabled, you will see a language indicator in each field that can be translated. This is only seen by the study administrators. A language code appears as shown to remind you which language is being edited. A menu lets you quickly toggle between the languages you chose to support. A green dot indicates that a translation has been provided for that field so it’s easy to track your progress.

Multilingual Considerations

While most people participating in a multilingual study might be bilingual, they are going to prefer reading and responding in their native language. This maximizes what you can get from each respondent without the confusion or clutter of duplicated text. We can think of many Canadian applications for English/French studies and American studies in English/Spanish. There’s of course countless language combinations in Europe, Asia and beyond (you can activate more than two languages). Even when you don’t plan to socialize responses among participants, this new capability proves useful as researchers can setup a single study to collect responses for distinct languages or regions. Participants may never realize other languages are supported. Since all results will now be consolidated for analysis, there’s considerably less work to synthesize results, especially for complex data that one gets from Image Reviews, Sort and Rank and Grid tasks. You can of course segment participants based on their language or region if you want to filter results (e.g. to generate an English-only word cloud). It’s always easier to separate and filter data than to try to combine it later. We really hope our domestic and international customers will take advantage of this new capability. It’s available today on all sites at no additional cost. We look forward to receiving your feedback. Be sure to also read about the other important change in this update, New Activity Guidance Options.