Multi-Lingual Forms... What Black Magic Is This???

We live in a modern world, which means working with colleagues, internal and external stakeholder, and clients from different backgrounds. For everyday interactions, this is fine, but every now and then, it can get messy.

Does this resonate with you? An important client in Asia needs something, and they are not happy. However, the operations person you are speaking to does not speak great English, and so an important deal has been bungled. If you’re particularly unlucky, right now while you are reading this post, said deal IS being bungled.

This post is going to cover how to build multi lingual forms, so that you can get information to and from different parts of your organisation effectively. It assumes you have either (i) overseas outsourced service provider who may not have good communication skills (in English), or (ii) overseas export prospects/clients with staff who you have to deal with, who also lacks communication skills (in English).

Specifically, we will take a simple form in English, and translate to French (our assumed non English speaking client) and Hindi (our assumed outsourced service provider).

Steps

1. Please direct your browser to videotranslator.ai, and then click on the Login button. Once logged in, create a new template called myMultiLingualTemplate.

   

2. On entering myMultiLingualTemplate, click on View and select to show Language Settings. This should look like below - please note, this specific subscription is an enterprise subscription with English as the primary language, and French and Hindi as secondary languages.

3. We are simulating an organisation with English as our primary language spoken across the organisation. In this specific case, we will pretend our organisation has an external client in France, hence the French, and an outsourced back office in India, hence the Hindi. Removing any secondary language will mean items of this template cannot be translated into the unselected language. Please close Language Settings once complete.

   

4. We can now add different components. In this post we will stick to fields, which both retail and enterprise subscriptions have access to, but please note complex (nested) data structures can be handled with generics.

   

   

5. So we are just going to add one text field here - where are you from - in the form. Click to add a text field, and the result looks like below. Note that the Information has been changed from Please upload Text content? to Where are you from? in our example.

   

6. Above, please also note the additional collections available. Essentially template knows its items are expected to move between collections Sydney, Mumbai and Paris. The eye icon denotes read permissions, and the pencil icon denotes write permissions.

7. The process is almost complete. Now, we simply translate the template and get the translated versions - one for French and one for Hindi. Each template can now produce items as required.

   

   

8. Once complete, the forms look like below. Again, the use case for this is, (i) the French form is for a client in Paris, who wants to fill out the form in French, and (ii) the Hindi form is for the outsourced service provider in Mumbai, who wants to fill out the form in Hindi.

   

   

9. Above, please note the transliteration option in the Hindi form - in an ideal world, your client fills in this form using a computer set to a French keyboard (or Hindi keyboard), however this might not be the case. The transliteration service allows for a user to type Hindi into a English keyboard, and the transliteration is phonetic.

10. Due to the nature of the platform, the French form or Hindi form above, when filled in can be brought back to English (using translate again), so that the English speaking staff can work with the form information.

Conclusion

This is a fairly complex post, and largely, it is not expected that the average user will need to use this functionality. Should you have any questions, specific to enterprise subscription functionality, please talk to your account manager.

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