How is the “Base Language” Actually Determined in Qualtrics — First Written vs First Added via Translation?

Hi,

By default, the base language of a survey will be the account setting language of the user who created the survey. If a user is using French as the platform language in their user settings, the survey’s base language will be FR. If they’re using English (UK) in their user settings, the base language of surveys they create will be EN-GB, and so on.

When you add translations after that, the base language won’t change unless you explicitly change it in the survey translations options. Additional translations can then be hidden in the drop-down menu if needed via the same page.

The base language is edited in the survey builder, not in the translations section.

Hi ​@vgayraud ,

Yes, exactly — that was my understanding as well.

Just to clarify, my question is specifically about the base language of the email invite template, not the survey. I wanted to confirm how the base language is determined on the invite side when multiple invite translations exist.

Emails don’t have a base language setting like surveys.

In my experience the emails will be sent according to this priority order:

1. Contact’s language if the email has a corresponding translation
2. Survey’s base language if email isn’t translated in the contact’s language or if the contact’s language value is empty

Hi ​@vgayraud 
 

Hi, thanks for your input. I spent some time testing the email template translation behavior, and after multiple tests, I found that the base language for the email template is determined by the alternate language selected while creating a custom survey translation.

 

As you can see, my survey’s base language is English (US), but for the custom translation I added German as the alternate language. When I sent the survey with the contact language left blank, the survey displayed in English (as expected, since it’s the base language), but the email template displayed in German, because that was added as the alternate language.

Please let me know if this makes sense to you and if my understanding is correct.

Hi ​@gPandey_715 

I never had to use custom languages so I can’t confirm, but it seems unintuitive (and maybe even buggy) that the email would default back to the alternate of a custom language that is not the base language.

Were you using preview emails when you tested or real distributions, and in which language was your account set up? 

Hi ​@gPandey_715 & ​@vgayraud,

I too never used this before, but after seeing the steps shared by ​@gPandey_715  i tried to recrete same in my sandbox. i setu my base language as English and added alternative langauge as Kannada. i distrubuted one email to myself but it didnt work, email was in  my base langauge only. I used real distribution not the preview email. 

Did i miss any steps or is it the usual behaviour?

​@vgayraud Yes, same here — this is actually my first time working with custom languages as well, so I’m also trying to understand what the ideal/expected behavior should be.

Just for reference: I had an email invite template with only two translations configured — Switzerland-German and Switzerland-Italian. My contact language field was empty.
In this scenario:

• The survey opened in English,

• But I received the email in Switzerland-German.

That’s what confused me, since I was expecting both to fall back to the same language. Any thoughts on why the email would default to Switzerland-German in this case?

The survey language doesn’t follow the email language unless that language is also present in the directory for a given contact. If that field is empty or contains a value for which there is no translation, it will default back to the browser’s language (if there is a translation for it) or to the survey base language.

If you want to force the survey language, append ?Q_Language=XX to the survey url in the email message.

Base language would be the one that will come without any Q_Language when you preview/ publish the survey. Like we do English, but LATAM might use Spanish as Base language then keeping English as optional/ drop down listed language.

Hello ​@gPandey_715, 

Were you able to find any solution? Let me know if you come across anything. 

Hi ​@Sachin Nandikol ,

I am still investigating this and will definitely let you know once I understand the exact reason behind this platforms behavior.