Did you know only around 360 million people speak English as their first language (Babbel)? Whilst 360 million is a lot of people, it’s not that many in relation to the world’s entire population. Out of the world’s approximate 7.5 billion inhabitants, 20% (1.5 billion) speak English. That means there are 6 billion people who don’t.
How many of them are your customers, or employees?
THE IMPORTANCE OF MULTI-LINGUAL SURVEYS
One of Avius’ clients, an iconic London attraction, has 41% of their surveys completed in a language other than English. That’s a lot of customer feedback they might not have received if they didn’t offer a multi-lingual survey.
Airports are also amongst places that benefit from offering passenger feedback surveys in foreign languages. With a large number of tourists from all around the world travelling every day, you don’t want to miss out on vital feedback and heart-warming testimonials.
When you offer satisfaction surveys in multiple languages, you show that you appreciate and respect the needs and opinion of all your customers. So, enable your customers or employees to take your survey in the language of their choice. That way they will be able to fully understand the questions. As a result, you’re more likely to get accurate answers, and therefore, better insights to act on.
PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATION
To ensure your translations are accurate, we’d advise that you either use our translation service or another professional company. Google Translate or similar services may get the general message across, but the meaning or context is not always interpreted correctly. Additionally, automation software doesn’t understand cultural differences, whereas a professional translator will account for those. If you’re going to make the effort of providing your survey in multiple languages, it’s worth doing it correctly.
USE IMAGES
As well as translating the copy in your surveys, you can use images to help convey meanings.
LIST OF AVAILABLE LANGUAGES
| Arabic | French | Portuguese |
| Bulgarian | German | Punjabi |
| Bangla | Hebrew | Russian |
| Catalan | Hindi | Slovak |
| Czech | Indonesian | Spanish |
| Chinese - Simplified | Irish | Spanish - Latin American |
| Chinese - Traditional | Italian | Swedish |
| Danish | Japanese | Thai |
| Dutch | Korean | Turkish |
| English | Malay | Urdu |
| Farsi | Norwegian | Vietnamese |
| Filipino | Persian | Welsh |
| Finish | Polish |
OFFER SURVEYS IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES
Avius can automatically translate your survey responses into English, so you don’t need internal resource for every language. Get in touch with us if you’d like to start providing your surveys in a choice of languages.
By Caroline Hawksworth
