I use Microsoft Forms a fair bit but mostly it’s with my own students. But when I’m working with larger groups outside the school, it’s a nice option to offer a multi-lingual entry form (especially in Canada where the two official languages are English & French). Microsoft Forms adds a quick&easy way to add as many language versions as you want. (From personal experience, you do not want to rely on automated translation if you have the option to provide them with the real translation!)
Create your form in whatever language you usually start with. Then, in the upper right corner, click on the 3-dot menu and choose MULTILINGUAL.
There is a LONG list of languages you can choose from; when you choose the language, Microsoft changes all of their system prompts (the header information, the buttons, etc) to that language automatically but then lets you add individual translations for each question/response. The list is in an unexpected order, so you can begin typing in the box and it will filter the list for you. (How do they put foreign languages in alphabetical order when they don’t use the same alphabet? That’s a question for Doug Peterson, I guess). There are at least 75 languages available (although I’d like to have a <blank> language so you can add your own — pig latin, anyone?)
When you’ve chosen your language, you now can click on the pen-icon next to the language.
That opens up the form for that language — in the box below each question/response you can write the translation for that entry. Notice that Microsoft has automatically replaced the “Enter your response” in the text box to “Entrez votre réponse” – you only have to change the text that you wrote in the original form; all the prompts for the Form itself have already been done (which is why you can only choose from the 75+ languages that Microsoft has already done).
Now, when your user takes your form, there will be a drop down in the upper right corner (you’ll want to mention that to folks!) that they can choose their language from.
You can go back to the 3-dot menu and choose MULTILINGUAL to add more languages or edit the translation you’ve already done (even after you’ve started to accept responses). When you download the Excel spreadsheet with all the responses, you may have an interesting time reading the answers… but don’t forget that Excel can automatically translate anything so you can set up a column next to each responses to give you the English response. I guess that’s for another post 🙂
