I am a first time user of Lime Survey. I am using it for my DCA at USQ in Queensland Australia. I require my survey to be both accessible in English and Traditional Chinese. I have made, I believe, the correct set up in Lime Survey for that to happen.

I have completed a small part of my survey using Limesurvey, as a test, and now wish to send it to my supervisor for checking and reaction, and also to a Chinese USQ student who will access the Chinese version and respond to the text question using Chinese characters. I assume once he has done that and I access his response that by selecting the English option the software will translate his response from Chinese to English?

I do note though when I have added questions including drop down selections in English and I preview using the Chinese option that not all I have entered, questions and sub-questions are translated into Chinese.

Could you please assist me in sorting this out, thank you, Once I have this done I will proceed to completing the survey and then resubmit it to my supervisor and Chinese proof reader before activating it and making it accessible to my participants

Not sure what you are referring to. Where do you expect Limesurvey to translate? The responses? I don't think so. I am not aware of a feature that translates the responses (but of course I don't know all features and everyday there is something new). Which "English Option" are you referring to?

Thank you Holch for your response.

When I attended a LimeSurvey workshop at the University I I was given the impression that te software would work in multiple languages.

These are the steps I took to set up the multiple language option.

Under 'Edit survey text elements and settings' I selected 'General Options' and then 'Additional Languages'. From the drop down menu I selected the other language 'Traditional Chinese', (my base language is English). I then saved the adjustments.

After inputting several questions and sub questions in English I went to 'preview' my survey. I could nominate previewing in either English or Chinese. The English was complete but Chinese was not. Some questions had been 'translated' but some not.

This led to my enquiry in this forum. I wonder if I need to input in both English and Chinese and if so how do I do that? Or will the software indeed translate my English input?

Thank you,

Mark

You will need to also put the question in the Chinese section (of course you need to translate it first).

There should be a tab to edit the other languages, just like shown here:

Thank you again for clarifying that I will need to input my Chinese questions and subquestions into the fields provided. I also hope to get feedback from the University. It seems I drew the wrong conclusion from the LimeSurvey workshop that the software would "translate" my English input.

I think there was once the option to let Google Translate do the translation, but I haven't seen this feature lately. Also Google Translate via the API (which you need for this) is not free anymore, afaik.

However, as someone who uses Google Translate on a daily basis I would not go down this route anyway.

While Google Translate has come a long way and actually does some pretty god translations sometimes, other times it fails misserably. I would not trust any data collected with a survey that has been translated by Google Translate.

I use it a lot, but only for languages that I actually know and just want a little support to translate quicker or for languages that I don't know to get a rough idea of what the text says. But you must be aware that it can happen quite easily that Google Translate translates the exact oposite of what it should say. It already happened to me, luckily with a language that I know quite well.

So, to sum this up: get a good translation for your survey, if you take it seriously. Otherwise you won't know what you are actually analyzing and if the data you are working with is worth analyzing at all.

As I need my survey to work in Traditional Chinese as well as English I have employed a Chinese student from the university who has translation experience.

As a test I did try Google Translate. It did the translations from my English text and I was able to cut and paste them into my survey. It all seems to work but now I want to send it to my university supervisors and also to the Chinese student to 'edit' my Chinese inputs. I have tried to enter their details into 'Survey Permissions' but it hasn't worked. Is there another work around for this?

Thank you again your advice, it's greatly appreciated as there is no-one around over the holidays to assist and I need to get this done.