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Translate statements and templates

Purpose​

Offer your assessments in more than one language, and keep those translations current when the English changes.

Who this is for​

Account administrators and anyone holding the account's translation permission.

The order matters​

Two settings pages, and the first gates the second.

  1. Languages — choose which languages this account offers. With none enabled, the in-app language switcher is hidden and the whole feature is effectively off for the account.
  2. Translations — author the actual text.

Both are in the sidebar and both require the account-modify or translations-manage permission.

Step 1 — enable languages​

Open Languages. Tick each language you want to offer; English is marked base / source and is what everything is translated from. Choose Save languages; Cancel reverts unsaved ticks.

Enabling a language does not create any translations. It makes the language selectable — in the in-app switcher, on public campaign pages, and in the assessment taker's header. Untranslated content falls back to English.

Step 2 — translate​

Open Translations. The page has three tabs — Statements, Templates and Campaigns — and they share the same shape: a row of target-language buttons, a To translate (n) / Translated (n) pair of tabs, a search box, and a coverage badge reading "n/total translated" for the selected language.

Statements​

Action statements are single reusable pieces of content, translated once and reused wherever they appear.

On the To translate tab, each row shows the statement id and the English text with a box underneath. Either type the translation and choose Save, or choose Machine translate to draft it first and then edit before saving. With no provider configured for the environment, Machine translate does not fail silently: it fills the box with the English source text and says so — "Machine translation isn't configured (no provider) — showing the source text."

On the Translated tab, each row is badged with its source — authored, ont (text supplied by the ontology, the upstream source of the statement) or machine. Edit and Save as needed. A machine draft also offers Promote to authored, which accepts the draft as-is and re-badges it, and every row offers Delete.

Templates​

Templates carry a whole SurveyJS body, so the editor works differently. Choose between two modes with the Structured / Raw JSON toggle:

  • Structured — a field-by-field editor over the template's strings, including the labels and options of custom fields. This is the mode to use.
  • Raw JSON — the localized body as JSON, for surgical fixes. Load English body to translate seeds the editor from the current English; Reset to base replaces the editor contents with the current English again. Invalid JSON is refused with the error shown under the box.

Save with Save localized body.

Keeping translations current​

When the English template changes after a translation was saved, the translated row is badged Stale — needs review in amber, with the note "The base template changed after this translation was saved — re-sync from the base body or review the strings."

Work through stale rows by reviewing the strings in Structured mode, or by resetting to base and retranslating.

Statements have no equivalent staleness badge — the coverage count is what tells you whether new statements have appeared.

What participants see​

  • Assessment content is served in the participant's chosen language. The taker page shows a language menu in the header when more than one language is enabled, and changing it reloads the questions.
  • Public campaign pages carry the same language selector.
  • Interface chrome — the dashboard's buttons, banners and status pills — is not translated by this workflow. It stays in English and is left to the browser's own page-translation feature. Deciding otherwise is a product change, not a translator task. The questionnaire's own navigation is the one exception: SurveyJS localises Next / Previous / Complete itself from the language the respondent chose, so a French taker reads Terminer without anyone translating it here.

Limits and gotchas​

  • English is the source. There is no way to author in another base language.
  • Machine translation is a drafting aid: its output is badged machine until a human saves or promotes it, so you can always tell which is which.
  • Deleting a translation returns that content to the English fallback rather than breaking it.