I’m starting a new project and I’m currently in the planning stage.
We’re thinking of deploying the survey to an audience that is spread throughout different countries and we’re expecting people to essentially speak 1 of 3 languages (English being one of them).
How should I approach this?
Should I create 3 separate forms or is there a better way?
I’m concerned about the end game, the Reporting…
You can certainly add additional language support into your form to accommodate different speakers. Have a look at these guides:
And for multi-language XLSForms in general:
Thank you! @Xiphware 
I read both support articles. I prefer XLS form, so that’s the way I will go with.
I will check the ODK link later.
One question:
How do we see the data in Table and Reports inside KoboToolbox’s “Data” area? Is it all together? Or its divided by language?
And the part that confuses me is… how will I deal with the multi-language data, if I have to build an external report? (Excel or Google Looker Studio or Power BI)
Btw, I’ve used Power BI with KoboToolbox before, and it all worked fine, but all the data was single language.
The raw form data in the submission isn’t ‘translated’ in any fashion; it’s just the raw data values. For example, in this select:
The user will be presented - in KoboCollect or Enketo - with either “Yes”/“No”, or “Oui”/“Non” in the UI, depending on their chosen localization. But what will be actually stored and submitted will, regardless of language, in both cases be the raw text (ie name) strings yes or no.
So if you wish to map the raw data back to different languages for, say, external report generator (PowerBi, etc), then you will have to accompany the submission data with the form definition, because it is only the form definition that contains the multi-language translations.
Same is true for other questions, eg text entry or even different calendar types (!). The labels and hints displayed for each question might be translated to different languages for the user, but the data they enter - and submit - is still just the raw text (or in the case of datetimes, ISO 8601 timestamp).
Thanks @Xiphware 
What do you mean with “form definition” ?
I have finally started working on this project, I’ve made some internal tests with xlsform and I’m happy with the result for now. I can say the form translation part (the UI) is well understood on my part.
But thinking ahead, when it comes to Reporting, I have some doubts about what you wrote. Can you be more specific? I will be using Looker Studio and the plan is to build a report in one single language (English).
I understand the raw data will be available in the data, but I was wondering if the labels will be available as well?
I’ll give you an example based on country names, which is one of the fields that people will have to answer on my form.
In the choices sheet, I have a list of 50 countries, with 4 columns (name + 3 label languages).
The name column is where I’ve inserted a simplified version of the country names (no spaces or special characters). For example:
Now when I pull the data via API, into Google Looker Studio, what will happen? Will I only have access to the raw country names, or will I have access to the English labels as well? As you can imagine, it’s much nicer to present the country name in its full extended version, not the simplified version.
Hey @Xiphware
Hope you’re doing well! 
Can you give me some of your inputs on my last comment?
Apologies for the delay in responding (I’ve been overseas training).
Yes you can certainly choose to export the submission data with the question labels and select option labels suitably translated into one of your form’s supported languages, or keeping the original raw values instead. For example, for this very simple form:
adFGdhnXpYFDk5FWDMsKJu.xlsx (6.4 KB)
with the following two submissions:
I can choose to export this dataset with all the labels in English:
or French:
or omitting labels entirely and keeping just the raw XML names (note the Formbuilder’s default underscored question Data Column Names are now the column headers):
Please note, the exported XLS data format is whatever you happen to pick when you Export it as; this is completely independent of what language was selected when the original submission was filled in.
Does this answer your question?
Thank you @Xiphware !
This is a very detailed answer. Love it!
It has helped me and I hope it will be helpful to others in the future as well.
