Multi-language research

One study often has to cover several markets: developers in the US, Spain and Brazil, each interviewed in their own language. LetsFindWhy keeps that in one project, with a separate track per language, and lets a teammate who speaks only English follow a Spanish interview live.

Say you are testing a new pricing page for your API product in three markets. You run one project with a process for each language, a guide written in each language, and one recruitment link per market. Your product manager watches the São Paulo sessions from the Backroom, reading the conversation in English as it happens.

Set up a study per language

A process is one track of a study. Each process has one or more language and country pairs, such as Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico, and those pairs decide what the people you recruit can choose and which language each interview runs in.

Open Processes in the project and click Add Process, or edit an existing one.
Under Languages, choose a Country, then a Language. The list starts with the languages spoken in that country; Show all languages offers every other one.
Click Add language for each further pair this process should accept, then save.

You can add a pair at any time. Once someone has signed up for a pair it is locked and cannot be changed or removed, so plan the pairs before you share the link.

Put two pairs in one process when they share a language, such as English in the US and in the UK. Give each language its own process when the guide has to change, which it does whenever the language does: each process then has its own guide, its own recruitment link and its own pipeline on the project dashboard.

The interview language

Every interview has one language, fixed when it is created. When you invite a recruit, it is the language they chose when they signed up. When you create an interview by hand on a process with several pairs, you pick it from the Language list.

The AI moderator reads your discussion guide word for word, so it asks the questions in the language the guide is written in. Write each process’s guide in that process’s language, introduction and closing included. Its follow-up questions and short acknowledgements are its own, in the language of the conversation. See AI-moderated interviews.

Follow along in your own language

Moderators and observers can turn on live transcription in the meeting room. Each line appears as it is spoken, with a translation into your own interface language underneath. Every viewer gets their own translation, so an English observer and a German one can follow the same Portuguese session side by side, and participants never see it.

In the meeting, open the Transcript tab in the sidebar.
Click Start transcription. Lines appear while it shows Listening…; click Stop when you are done.

Live transcription works for sessions held in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and Italian. It translates into any of the app’s interface languages. More detail is in Transcripts.

What participants see

The signup page, the meeting room and the other pages participants use appear in their browser’s language when it is one of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian or Arabic (shown right to left), and in English otherwise.
Emails to a recruit (the signup check, the interview invitation, survey links and consent receipts) are sent in the language they signed up with, with dates written the way their country writes them.
Screener and survey questions are shown as you wrote them. They have one text each, so a screener for several languages belongs in a process per language.

Consent forms in every language

A consent form has one tab per language on its process, and each participant signs the version in the language they signed up with. Start from a template and every tab is filled in its own language. Write your own and Translate from fills a tab with a machine translation of one you have written, for you to read before you save. A form is not shown to anyone until every language has its text. See Consent forms.

Analysis across languages

Ask AI answers in the language you ask in and searches every transcript in the project, so one English question covers the Spanish and Portuguese sessions too. Quotes stay in the language they were spoken. Insights are currently written in English. See AI analysis.

Each recording is transcribed in its interview’s language, and uploads in whatever language they turn out to be spoken in. Arabic is the exception for now: Arabic recordings are kept and play back as normal, but their transcripts are not reliable yet.

Tips for researchers

Run one pilot interview per language before you open recruitment. A native speaker on the team catches the guide question that translated literally and reads oddly.
Countries that share a language can share a process and a guide, but check the wording: a developer in Mexico and one in Spain call a few things differently.
Give each panel provider or community the link of its own process. You can then see each market’s progress separately and close one market without touching the others.
Every language costs the same. Interviews use minutes from your plan, and live transcription and translation add nothing on top.