Accuracy and speed are critical to the success of any market research translation project. The team at Language Intelligence wants to make sure your project goes off without a hitch, and fortunately, there are a few simple preparation steps you can do to make submitting survey content for translation easy and fast.
Keeping the following details in mind will lead to an accurate and fast project turnaround.
1. Use Detail When Outlining the Specs of the Project
When sending over your project to our team, please include as many details as you can when it comes to its scope, such as:
word count,
languages required,
open comment fields,
visuals and/or other media elements needed,
any deadlines,
the platform.
However, we can make this part easy for you! Our proprietary Intellitranslate technology can prep survey files with the click of a button.
There is no such thing as too much detail when providing specs for your project. After all, when you include as much specific information as you can, it allows us to provide a fully-fledged scope and get your project started right away.
2. Specify the target market and locales
To provide the best localization service possible, it is imperative to know the target market, geographic area, and locale for each language you require. This is because different countries sharing the same language may have significant differences in the meaning and usage of words.
For example, Mexican, Argentine, and continental Spanish are different enough that a Spanish speaker may be confused reading a Mexican translation, and vice versa. You truly don’t want to get things lost in translation, so to bypass any discrepancies in how a language is spoken, written, and read, we use in-country, native-speaking translators on all our projects.
3. Ensure your survey is properly localized before it is sent to field
Localization assures that your survey is culturally relevant and appropriate for all respondents. Ensuring that your survey developers are aware of the differences between cultures allows them to take the appropriate measures to localize the survey content before it goes to field.
Remember, language is an intensely cultural thing and even small errors can turn people off. You don’t want this to happen - localization mistakes can cause a high abandonment rate and skew your data.
4. Remember language-specific formatting
It is important to understand that the formatting and text length of your document will differ from language to language and your survey may not always present the same from country to country.
For example, Arabic and Hebrew read from right to left, so if the survey is originally written in English, the survey will be flipped. Or, some languages, like German, can be up to 30% longer than the English original when translated. So it is important to understand how the survey will be presented in its final translated language so you can deal with any and all formatting issues. This will ensure you get the most accurate data possible as soon as the survey is sent to field.
5. Consider survey comment translation
Will you be using open-ended comment fields? If so, you’ll need survey comment translation and localization services. This is when you translate the respondent’s answers back from their language into English, so you can accurately analyze and understand the data you have collected.
Language Intelligence has created a comprehensive survey comment translation process making it easy to collect and translate your survey verbatims with ease.
6. Determine if you will have an internal review
Our two-step translation and localization services include a native translator and editor who both take a look at your content. However, if you have the resources for a member of your team to review the content, let us know. We will include the review time within the timeline of your project.
7. Don’t be afraid to get in touch!
If you have questions about survey translation or your surveys include unusual elements, our project managers are happy to work with you to ensure that these do not negatively impact each project. They have extensive, day-to-day experience managing survey translations across many language pairs, within tight deadlines. Take advantage of this experience and your market research translation projects will go smoothly.
Have a market research project you need to be translated? Let's chat.