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Translating surveys to other languages

Simplesat gives you two ways to run surveys in languages other than English. Which approach you use depends on your plan and how you want to manage translations.

Written by Simplesat
Updated over a week ago

Plan availability: All plans (basic language) ✓ Elite ✓ Enterprise (Multilingual surveys)

Option 1: Single-language surveys (all plans)

Every survey has a default language setting in the Configure tab. This controls how Simplesat translates built-in interface elements — things like the back, skip, and next buttons in your web survey.

To set your survey language:

  1. Open your survey and click Configure.

  2. Under Language, select your preferred language from the dropdown.

Your survey content — questions, choices, and confirmation messages — is whatever you've written in the survey builder. Simplesat doesn't translate that for you; you enter it directly in the language you want.

If you want to support multiple languages using this approach, you create a separate survey for each language. That works, but it means more setup, separate dashboards, and no aggregate reporting across languages.

Option 2: Multilingual surveys (Elite and Enterprise)

Multilingual surveys let you run one survey in multiple languages. Respondents see the survey in their preferred language automatically, and all responses stay in a single dataset with reporting you can filter by language.

This replaces the need to create and maintain separate surveys per language.

How to set up a multilingual survey

1. Enable multilingual surveys

  1. Open your survey and click Configure.

  2. Under Language, check the Multilingual surveys checkbox.

  3. The language table appears below. Your default language is listed at the top (English by default — you can change this).

2. Add your languages

Click + Add language and select the languages you want to support.

3. Translate your survey content

Click Import translations. This opens a modal with a three-step workflow:

  1. Click Download template CSV. This downloads a file containing all your survey questions, choices, and confirmation messages — one row per element, one column per language you've added.

  2. Open the CSV in Excel or Google Sheets. Your default language content is already filled in. Fill in the translations for each language column.

    • Tip: You can paste the CSV into any AI tool (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) and ask it to fill in the translations for you as a starting point.

  3. Save the file as CSV, then drag it into the upload area or click select a file from your computer.

Simplesat validates the file on import. Any language column that has missing translations is skipped — only fully translated languages are imported.

4. Activate your languages

Each language in the table shows two statuses inline on its row.

Translation completeness

  • No label — the language is fully translated and ready to activate.

  • Incomplete badge — one or more translations are missing. The language can't be activated until all rows are filled in and re-imported.

Visibility to respondents

  • Filled green circle (active) — the language is live and visible to respondents.

  • Empty circle (inactive) — the language exists but is hidden from respondents.

A language must be fully translated before you can set it active. Imported languages always start as inactive so you can preview safely before anything goes live.

To activate a language, click the ... menu next to it and select Set active.

5. Preview before going live

Click Preview and select a language from the dropdown to check how it looks. You can preview both active and inactive languages — only active ones are visible to real respondents.

How language detection works

When a respondent opens your survey, Simplesat selects the language in this order:

  1. A lang parameter in the survey URL (e.g. ?lang=fr)

  2. The respondent's browser language

  3. The survey's default language

Respondents can also switch languages manually using the language selector on the survey itself.

Forcing a specific language via URL: Add ?lang= followed by the language code to your survey URL. Example: ?lang=fr for French. If the code doesn't match an active language, Simplesat falls back to browser language, then the survey default.

Managing languages after setup

Changing the default language

In the language table, click the ... menu next to any language and select Set as default. Once multilingual is enabled, the single-language dropdown at the top is replaced by the language table.

Adding a new question after your survey is already translated

New questions are created in the default language only. This marks all other languages as incomplete — but they stay active, and any missing translations fall back to the default language until you re-import updated translations.

To update: click Import translations, download the template again (it includes the new question), add translations, and re-import.

Deleting a language

Click the ... menu next to the language and select Remove.

Reporting by language

Every response records the language it was submitted in. You can see this on the individual response detail page.

In reports and dashboards, use the Language filter to segment results by language while keeping everything in one dataset.

Permissions

Only Owners and Admins can manage multilingual survey languages (add, remove, activate, import/export). Managers and Collaborators cannot access these settings.

What happens if you downgrade from Elite or Enterprise

  • Existing multilingual surveys keep collecting responses.

  • Surveys are locked to the default language — the language selector is hidden from respondents.

  • You can no longer add, remove, or manage languages, or import/export translation CSVs.

  • Language filtering in reports still works.

Supported languages

  • Simplesat uses IETF language tags. The supported languages are:

Language

Code

Arabic

ar

Bengali

bn

Bulgarian

bg

Burmese

my

Chinese (Simplified)

zh-CN

Chinese (Traditional - Hong Kong)

zh-HK

Czech

cs

Danish

da

Dutch

nl

English

en

Filipino

fil

Finnish

fi

French

fr

German

de

Hungarian

hu

Icelandic

is

Indonesian

id

Italian

it

Japanese

ja

Khmer

km

Korean

ko

Lao

lo

Macedonian

mk

Malay

ms

Mongolian (Cyrillic)

mn

Norwegian

no

Polish

pl

Portuguese

pt

Romanian

ro

Russian

ru

Slovak

sk

Spanish

es

Swedish

sv

Thai

th

Turkish

tr

Vietnamese

vi

Don't see your language? Let us know and we'll see what we can do.

Frequently asked questions

Will survey emails be translated too?

Not yet. Email translation is on the roadmap. Survey content and the web survey interface are fully multilingual today.

I added a language, but respondents can't see it.

Check two things: the language must be fully translated (no incomplete rows), and it must be set to Active.

I imported a CSV but one language didn't update.

If any row in a language column is empty, that entire language is skipped on import. Fill in all rows for that language and re-import.

The Simplesat dashboard shows everything in English — is that right?

Yes. The Simplesat app interface is always in English. Multilingual surveys affect the survey that respondents see, not the admin interface.

Can I use the Public API to get the language of a response?

Yes. The language field is included in the Response object in the API.

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