Translate a Survey into Another Language

Duplicate-and-translate lets you stand up a fully-translated copy of any Dynamic Survey in a few clicks — pick a target language, and Qualz.ai produces a parallel survey with translated questions, options, sections, title, and objective. The original survey stays exactly as it was.

This is the recommended way to field the same study across multiple language markets without rebuilding the survey or copy-pasting through a translation tool.

What gets translated

• Survey title
• Survey objective and description
• Section titles and section descriptions
• Question text and any question-level descriptions
• Answer options for choice / grid / ranking questions
• Other user-facing strings the participant sees during the survey

What is NOT translated:

• Existing survey responses — past answers stay in their original language
• Internal IDs and routing logic (branching/screener rules continue to work the same way)
• Stimulus images and uploaded media

101 supported languages

The translation feature uses the same language list as the rest of Qualz.ai's translation pipeline — 100+ options including all major regional variants:

• English variants — Global, US, UK, Australian
• European — Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Czech, Russian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Greek, and 30+ others
• Asian — Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Urdu, Indonesian, Malay, and 20+ others
• Middle Eastern & African — Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Swahili, Amharic, Hausa, Yoruba, Zulu, and others
• Smaller / regional — Welsh, Basque, Catalan, Maltese, Maori, Hawaiian, Esperanto, Latin, and many more

If you don't see a language you need, contact your account representative — we can add new languages on request.

How to translate a survey

Step 1: Open the survey list

1. From your dashboard, open the Dynamic Surveys list
2. Find the survey you want to translate

Step 2: Click Duplicate

1. Click the three-dot menu (⋮) on the survey row
2. Select Duplicate
3. The Duplicate Survey dialog opens

Step 3: Toggle "Also translate this copy"

In the dialog:

1. Flip the "Also translate this copy" switch on
2. Two language pickers appear: Source language (optional) and Target language (required)

Step 4: Pick languages

• Source language — leave blank to let the LLM auto-detect from the existing survey content. Set it explicitly only if your survey is multi-language already and you want to anchor the source.
• Target language — choose the language you want the duplicate translated into. Source and target must differ.

Step 5: Confirm

1. Click Duplicate
2. The duplicated survey is created immediately with a (Copy) suffix in your survey list, so you have something to point to right away.
3. Translation runs in the background — you'll see a progress notification on the dashboard:
   • 0–10% — Loading the survey and preparing for translation
   • 10–85% — Calling the LLM (one or more passes for long surveys)
   • 85–90% — Writing translated strings back to the survey
   • 100% — Done. The survey list now shows the translated title.

When translation completes, open the new survey to review the translations before sharing with participants.

Quality and review

The translation is produced by a high-quality multilingual LLM tuned for research instruments. We recommend a quick human review before fielding, especially for:

• Domain-heavy questions (medical, legal, technical) where terminology choice matters
• Constructs that depend on idioms or culturally-specific phrasing
• Branching logic that depends on exact answer-option text (rare, but worth a sanity check)

You can edit any translated string directly in the survey builder after translation completes — translation is a starting point, not a one-way operation.

What happens if translation fails?

Translation calls a multilingual LLM. If a call fails (content filter, transient network error, etc.), the duplicate is still preserved with its original source-language text — you don't lose any work. The notification is marked Failed with a short reason. You can:

• Retry by duplicating again with the same target language
• Edit the duplicate and translate manually
• Contact support if you see consistent failures on a specific language

Entitlement usage

Translation runs on the same backend as other AI work and consumes Analysis Units from your workspace's entitlements. The exact cost depends on survey length — longer surveys with more sections and options need more LLM calls. The dashboard will let you know if you're short before the translation starts.

For details on entitlement usage and how to top up, see:

• What are Entitlements?
• How to Add Member Seats, Workspaces, or More Entitlements

Tips

• Test with one language first. If you're fielding across many markets, translate to one target language, validate quality and routing, then duplicate-and-translate for the remaining markets.
• Keep a "master" source survey. Treat the original as the source of truth and translate from it for every market — that way structural edits propagate cleanly.
• Pair with multilingual interview studies. If your study mixes a survey screener with follow-up interviews, you can run AI-moderated interviews in the participant's native language too — see the multi-language docs for full coverage.

Related Guides

• How to Design Surveys — Building the source survey that you'll translate from
• How to Build Surveys with AI — Generating new surveys from a brief
• How to Configure and Share Survey — Distribution after translation
• Transcript Workflows: Translation — Translating interview transcripts post-hoc