Language editor

Survey languages

Click on the Survey Languages menu item to create and edit languages, assign language identifier, set active default language, set language selection variable, copy language elements, and to access the language selection log.

Overview of existing languages

The overview table in the “Edit languages” section lists all existing languages of the project along with the following information:

• ID: Each language receives an identification number from the system. This number cannot be changed. In the export data record, you will find this language identification number in the form of the “language” variable indicating the language version of the questionnaire that was displayed to the respondent

• Language: Language label. The default language is marked accordingly.

• Language identifier: Serves as unique identification of language and region.

• Default language: This column indicates the current default language of the project.

Depending on your access rights the following actions are available:

• Edit languages: Opens a dialog where you can change label and identifier of the respective language.

• Print: Opens a view of the questionnaire in the respective language optimized for printing.

• Rights: Opens the dialog for assigning read or write rights for the respective language to particular user teams in a targeted manner.

• Use as default language

• Delete: The respective language will be deleted after a confirmation prompt.

You can use the View button to hide particular columns of the table or limit the number of rows.

Uniquely characterizing languages with a language identifier

The language identifier allows you to uniquely identify languages and regions. For example, de_DE: German / Germany; en_US: English / USA; en_GB: English / Great Britain. Using the identifier is particularly helpful when a questionnaire is to be localized for different dialects of the same language, e.g. British and American English.

The identifier is composed of

• language ID according to ISO 639. A list can be found at http://www.loc.gov/standards/iso639-2/php/code_list.php

• country ID according to ISO 3166. A list can be found at http://www.iso.org/iso/country_codes/iso_3166_code_lists/english_country_names_and_code_elements.htm

• For example, de is the code for German, DE is the country ID. Accordingly, the language identifier of a German language text localized for Germany is de_DE.

Creating languages

Proceed as follows

• Click on the Create language button.

• In the “label” field, assign a name to the new language.

• Optionally, you can initialize the new language with phrases from an already existing language. To do so, specify your desired source language in the field “Copy language phrases from”.

• Assign a language identifier to the new language.

• Finally, confirm by clicking on Save.

Copying language elements

Survey allows you to copy texts from an already existing language into another language.

• The “Copy language phrases from” function allows you to initialize a new language with existing phrases from another language. See the section “Create language” above.

• In order to fill or overwrite an already existing language with language elements from another language, specify the source and target languages in the “Copy language elements” field and confirm by clicking on Execute.

Setting the active default language

Among the existing languages of a multilingual project, one language will be treated as the default language. That means the following:

• This language will automatically be used in the output questionnaire, unless an individual language preference for the respondent has been set by defining a language selection variable or unless a language selection page has been set up.

• The language elements of the default language will appear in the questionnaire editor, whereas you can only edit the language elements of the other languages via the language editor.

• The language elements of the default language will always appear in the first column of the language editor.

• If a language element has not been filled in for another language, the finished questionnaire will show the corresponding language element of the default language instead.

To find out which language performs the function of default language, check the column “Default language” in the overview of languages. When creating a project, the system will automatically set the language that is used in the admin area by the user creating the project as the default language. I.e. if the project is created by a staff member using the English-language admin area, the default language will automatically be set to English.

Changing the default language

instead of using the simultaneous central access to the language elements of all languages via the language element editor, you will need to change the default language. It is usually not advisable to proceed in this way because the Language editor provides convenient central access to the language elements of the various languages.

In order to change the default language, find the desired new default language in the list and click on the Use as default language icon. This change will simultaneously trigger a language selection blocker. Please observe the notes on this feature in the following section.

Blocking changes to the default language

If several staff members are working in the admin area at the same time, problems might occur. These can be prevented by incorporating the language selection blocker:

Let us assume that user A sets his or her native language, German, as the default language and starts work in the questionnaire editor. User B does not know about this and changes the default language to English. Now, user A wants to save his or her changes to the German-language questionnaire. However, while saving, the changes will not be entered in the originally set default language of German, but will instead overwrite the English text elements.

In order to avoid such overlapping, the change function will be blocked for all users after a change of the default language, and the Activate language button will no longer appear.

Only the user who last made the change as well as users with “root” rights will now see a button labeled Enable language selection instead of the Use as default language icon, and can unblock language selection by clicking on this button. The blocker remains active until the user who made the change logs out or their session ends.

After language selection has been unblocked or the last user’s session has ended, the default language can be changed again by any user. You want to change the default language, but the language selection blocker is active.

Setting the output language via a language selection variable

The language displayed at the start of the survey can be set via a data item known in advance, such as information from participant administration. In the “Read language selection by survey start from” drop-down list, you can define the variable from which the ID of the displayed language will be read at the start of the survey. Which variables are available depends on the project type:

• Anonymous projects: URL parameters

• Personalized projects: The standard variables in participant administration with the exception of “c_date” and “m_date”, and all additionally created participant variables as well as URL parameters. If you would like to use a participant variable especially for saving language information, then use the standard variable “u_language” which was introduced especially for this purpose.

• Panel and master data surveys: Participant data, master data, system data and URL parameters

Entering the language-setting variable in participant administration

• In language administration, specify from which variable the language setting is to be read.

• Confirm your entry by clicking on Save.

• Switch to Participant administration.

• If you select the Add participant button, you will find that the data item that was defined as the language variable (in the example shown below, the language version stored in u_language) can no longer be freely entered but only selected via a drop-down list.

• Now proceed entering or importing the participant data as usual.

Tracing changes made in language administration via the log

The “Language selection log” section displays important operations within language administration (e.g. creating and deleting languages and changing the default language) in chronological order. Therefore, you can also see here, among other things, who last changed the default language and is thus responsible for unblocking the language selection.

Tipps and Tricks