Bulk Translation

In many cases translations of text or chat data provided by respondents can be performed "individually" as the respondents provide the answers. However there may be cases where bulk translation is necessary, such as when post-processing respondent data for an older survey. This functionality enables you to translate the text responses for specific questions in bulk. It can also be useful if for example a Data Processing task doesn't work as expected.

For bulk translation you can create a simple survey specifically to perform the translation task. You could then have for example two questions; one into which you import the respondent data to be translated, the other to store the translated texts (go to Setting Up Questions for more information). Note that the order of the questions in the survey is not important.

Note: To use this functionality, the survey must allow the generic Forsta Plus API account API_FLEX to write to it.

To set up a bulk translation task:

1. Create your translation survey as necessary.
2. In the survey, go to Permissions and set the access level for the API_FLEX user to Write.
3. On the survey's Overview page go to the Language Translator extension, and on the Configuration page click Setup Bulk Translation.

The Bulk Translation overlay opens - .



Figure 1 - The Bulk Translation setup overlay

The configuration properties for the bulk task are as follows:

• Source Field Id - the survey question field that contains the texts that are to be translated.
• Target Field Id - the question into which the translated tests are to be placed.
• Language To - select the language you wish to translate to from the drop-down list.
• Language From - either leave the setting on the default Detect language, or select the language from the drop-down list (see the note below).
• Filter Expression - you can add an expression here to filter the data so for example only the data from a particular respondent or set of respondents is translated. Use the Filter expression in the same way as when exporting data.

Note: If you specify both the From and To languages, then the extension will only be able to translate from the specified source language. If you only specify the To language and leave the From language set to the default Detect language, then the extension will translate any language it recognizes into the target language.

4. When the properties are set as required, click Submit Task to run the translation.

By default, only records where the target field is null will be translated. That is, if the target field already holds some text then that record will not be translated. If you want to translate every record that matches the filter criteria, including records that have already been translated, check the Force re-translation box before you click Submit Task.

A log is presented towards the right side of the page. This indicates when the translation task was last run, its current status, and lists any messages (the latest messages are at the top of the list).

Note: This operation will work as a background task so you do not need to keep the page open once it has been submitted. You can come back at a later time to check the log shown on the right of the pop-up page.