Multilingual Surveys to Support More Inclusive Public Engagement
With an increased focus on inclusivity and achieving broad community engagement, our team is excited to announce a recent product enhancement to the MetroQuest survey software that aims to help planners achieve more diverse public participation and engage with a broader audience online.
Translating MetroQuest surveys – a new, streamlined approach.
When seeking inclusive, broad-based public engagement for planning, it’s important for planners to find ways to reach out to and connect with community members who don’t utilize English as their primary language. Depending on the make-up of the community, this can sometimes entail creating several different language editions of your survey and promoting them to targeted groups through different communication channels and campaigns.
The option to translate MetroQuest surveys into a variety of additional languages is a feature that has been around for a while. Historically, our Customer Support team was heavily involved in the process. With the objective to make this more efficient and less time consuming, we recently made a series of enhancements to MetroQuest to better support the translation process.
Now, when your team is in MetroQuest Studio, they will see a section dedicated to Translations and find all the information they need to facilitate a translation of any survey.
After creating a replica of your primary language survey and selecting the target language, confirming the new survey title and the launch and end dates of your new language edition, your team will be prompted to export the text to translate into the language(s) of your choosing. The next step, translating the text, can be done using our new Google Translate integration! Once the translation is complete, the translated text will be imported to your new language survey. At this stage, our Customer Support team will work with you to ensure your survey is ready to go before progressing past Pre-Launch.
Once you have a finalized edition of your survey in another language(s), a button – or buttons – will automatically appear on the Welcome Screen of your survey where participants can navigate to the survey of their choosing. Here’s an example:
We believe that everyone has a voice, and that together, we can plan better, more sustainable, and inclusive communities. MetroQuest’s mission is to deliver great online public engagement experiences that broaden outreach and bring people together to plan more livable places and move more people. With this enhancement, we hope to enable planners to work towards achieving that goal!
To learn more about MetroQuest and our recent product releases, check out my last blog: New Features for 2021: MetroQuest’s Online Survey for Planners.
For more great tips on how to make the most out of MetroQuest, contact your Customer Experience manager or reach out for more information!