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What language you see, and how to change it

Purpose​

Explain what decides the language of the screens a respondent sees — the buttons, headings and messages around the questions, not the questions themselves — and what is still English today.

Who this is for​

Anyone answering an assessment, and the account administrators who are asked why a screen came out in the wrong language.

Two different things, decided separately​

There are two languages on any respondent screen, and it helps to name them apart:

  • The questions. The wording of the questionnaire itself. These come from the account, which publishes each questionnaire in the languages it has translated.
  • The chrome. Everything around the questions: the Help link, the "Draft saved" pill, the progress counter, the submit button, the completion screen, the access-code card, the results pages, the withdraw panel.

Until September 2026 only the questions had a language. The chrome was English for everybody, whatever the questionnaire said. That is what changed.

How the language is chosen​

In this order, stopping at the first that answers:

  1. ?lang= in the address. A link someone handed you that ends in ?lang=fr opens in French. This is the strongest statement about what you want to read right now, so it beats everything below.
  2. Your saved choice. Picking a language from the switcher on a questionnaire or a campaign page stores it in this browser, so it survives the next visit and carries across the other respondent screens.
  3. Your profile's preferred language, if you are signed in.
  4. Your browser's language, negotiated against the languages the account has published.

A link a campaign manager copies out of their own dashboard carries no ?lang=, deliberately: otherwise their language would be pinned onto whoever opened it.

Setting it ahead of time, on /me/preferences​

The four steps above decide which language THIS VISIT is in. Signed-in respondents have a fifth, standing control at /me/preferences: a Reading language select, one per programme you hold a roster row in.

This is a different thing from the picker in step 2, even though the two overlap:

  • The /me/preferences select writes onto your roster row — the same Language field a coordinator's roster screen shows, described in What language your emails go out in. It decides the language your next email (an invitation, a reminder, an announcement) is written in, and it is what a link you have not opened yet will default to.
  • It does NOT override ?lang= on a link you are actually following, and it does not retroactively change a page you already have open. Step 1 above still wins for the page you are on right now.
  • Choosing "No preference" clears the field rather than writing English — the same "unset is not English" rule the tenant-admin side follows — and the bilingual default (your account's published languages, English first) applies again.

/me/preferences also answers with whatever your roster row already states — including a language B10.26 wrote back automatically the last time you answered a questionnaire with ?lang= in the address, so a choice you made mid-questionnaire shows up there without you having to state it twice.

Which languages​

French and English for the chrome, on both the respondent screens and the manager workspace. Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese are supported for questionnaire content and for email, and a respondent who chooses one of those sees the questions in it with English chrome — see "Limits and gotchas".

What the page tells assistive technology​

Every respondent page declares its language in the served HTML, before anything is drawn and whether or not scripting is enabled. That is what lets a screen reader pick French pronunciation for a French page rather than reading French text with an English voice. Words that stay English on a French page — product names — are marked as English individually, so they are read correctly too.

The manager workspace​

The workspace where campaigns are run — the sidebar, the campaign page with its tabs and figures, the participants table, the rules tab, the engagement tracker and the dialogs that open over them — now reads in French too, for anyone who asks for it. The switcher in the strip at the foot of the page is what asks: pick a language there and the whole workspace follows, including the language the page declares to a screen reader. Pick "Default" and it goes back to English.

Three things about it are worth knowing:

  • Nothing changes until you choose. A browser set to French does not put the workspace in French on its own. That is the difference from a respondent screen, where the browser's language is taken as a hint: someone answering an assessment arrives once, from an email, and will not go looking for a picker, whereas a coordinator who has worked in English for a year should not find the workspace in French one morning because of a laptop setting.
  • The switcher only appears on accounts that have enabled more than one language. Languages are opt-in per account, under Settings → Languages.
  • Not every workspace screen is translated yet. The sidebar, the campaign page, the participants table, the rules tab, the campaign builder, the per-assessment analytics page, the engagement tracker with its targets, follow-up and person dialogs, the Add People door with its bulk import, the two dialogs a roster row opens, the results visibility and release panels, the competency scorecards, the notifications bell and the sign-in card are. Still English: the campaign settings dialog, the report-definition editor, and the chrome of the dashboard, reports, contacts, assessments, labels, knowledge, auditor and settings pages.
  • A person's assessment states are in French; their roster STATUS is not. These are two different columns and only one of them is frozen. "Not started", "In progress", "Completed", "Declined" and "Withdrawn" describe how far somebody has got, and they translate. Draft, Active, Invited, Suspended and Completed are the status the system stores, quotes in the API and writes into an export, so they stay English until the Pilot has run once — the row menu therefore reads "Marquer « Active »", with the instruction in French and the stored word left alone.
  • Column names in a CSV import stay English. The paste box explains itself in French, but email, organisation, participantClass and label.<group> are the headers the importer actually reads, so they are shown as they must be typed.
  • Numbers and dates follow the language you chose. A French workspace groups thousands the French way and reads dates in French.

Product names stay English wherever they appear, and are marked as English so a screen reader pronounces them rather than sounding them out in French.

Limits and gotchas​

  • French is a draft. The French chrome has not yet been through a wording review. It is live because a half-reviewed French screen a respondent can finish is better than an English-only one they cannot.
  • Any sentence with no French yet appears in English. This is by design, not a bug: a missing translation falls back to English rather than leaving a blank. So a French screen may still have the odd English sentence on it.
  • Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese chrome does not exist. Choosing either gives you English chrome around content in your language. The machinery is the same, so adding them is a matter of writing the words, not of building anything.
  • The workspace is only partly translated. See "The manager workspace" above for which screens are done.
  • A competency topic keeps its own name. The scorecards' frame is translated; the taxonomy it scores against — the competency set and topic names, their codes, the version — is the canonical vocabulary of another product's registry, and a second name for a row people match by code would help nobody.
  • A downloaded export is always English. The XLSX codebook that explains what reopened or mandatory mean is a data artefact an analyst reads beside the stored keys, so two exports of the same campaign cannot disagree about a word. The screen is translated; the file is not.
  • What the server refuses is said in the server's words. A rule the campaign structure rejects, or a change a route turns down, is reported exactly as the server wrote it — in English — rather than reworded on the screen, so a coordinator and a support engineer are looking at the same sentence.
  • The privacy policy and the terms of use are English only. These are legal texts and they are not translated until counsel writes the French; the pages say they are English rather than showing French headings over English clauses.
  • Some error messages from the server are English. A few messages produced by the sign-in and activation steps are written on the server and are not yet part of the translated set.
  • Report labels follow the report, not the screen. A maturity report generated in French names its domains and themes in French. One generated without asking for a language is English throughout.
  • transactional-email-language.md — what language your invitations and reminders go out in
  • translator-workflow.md — how an account translates its own questionnaires
  • participant-your-results.md — reading your results
  • participant-preferences.md — every standing preference /me/preferences holds