RTL (right-to-left) Language Support

In the English language we write (and read) from left-to-right but there are several languages, such as Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Urdu that are written in the opposite direction, from right-to-left (or RTL). In addition to the approximately 300 million native speakers of Arabic (295 million) and Hebrew (5 million), there are ten major languages based on the Arabic alphabet, spoken by another 300 million people. In order to support them all, SurveyRock offers the ability to create surveys in RTL languages.

I’ll show you the steps required to create an RTL language survey but it’s really very simple. It’s the same as creating any other kind of survey except for just one additional step.

Create Survey

Our journey starts at your Survey Dashboard. Either at the menu in the black bar on the top or the green button at the bottom click on “+Create” and then “Survey” to create one from scratch or “Survey from Template” to use of our many predefined survey templates.

After you’ve clicked on that button a new window will open up. Enter the name for your new survey, a description and click “Submit“.

Now you have arrived at the survey editor and you’re ready to add questions or other survey elements.

Change Settings – Choose RTL

But wait! Now is a good time to complete that one extra step that we mentioned earlier. Click on the “Settings” button at the top and scroll to the bottom of the page.

Under the heading “Right-to-Left Languages”, click on “Yes” and then click on the green “Save Settings” button. Go back to the survey editor by clicking “Edit” at the top.

Before we add a question however, I’m going to change the survey title to something in Arabic. We could have done this when we first entered the title but I forgot. 😳

I apologize in advance to all our Arabic readers.  I don't know the language and will have to rely on Google Translate to get text for this example survey.  

The easiest way to change the title is to click on “Edit” next to the title at the top in green.

We’re going to create a seminar feedback survey, so enter “ندوة استطلاع رأي الحدث” in the title box and click “Update“. You’ll notice that the text automatically goes from right to left. Isn’t technology amazing?!

Add Question

Since the purpose of this exercise is simply to show you how to create an RTL survey, I will only add one basic question. Let’s ask the survey respondents what their overall impression of our event was. Double-click on the “+” button to insert a question and then double-click on “Rating Scale” so that the Add Rating Scale Question window opens up.

In the “Question” box at the top enter your first survey question, for example “بشكل عام ، ما مدى رضاك ​​عن ندوتنا” (Overall, how satisfied were you with our seminar).

In the choices box, type in what you would like to have along the right side of the question (“venue location”, “speakers”).

Next I’m going to choose the scaling option for this question. Normally I would choose something like “Likert Scale 5 Options (Satisfied -> Dissatisfied)”, but right now the predefined choices are all in English. Not a problem at all! From the dropdown menu simply select “User defined…” and in the bottom text box I can enter the Arabic translation of those 5 choices:

راض جدا
راض
محايد
غير راض
مستاء جدا

Click “Add” and you can see your first question. Notice that all of the options and title are from right-to-left.

We can click on the “Preview” button at the top to get a first look at our simple survey.

It looks pretty good so far but it’s not perfect yet. The “Survey Completed” text at the top is still in English as well as the “Submit” button at the bottom. Let’s change that now.

Change Survey Completed & Progress Bar Text

We can modify both of these things by going back to the Survey Settings page. Click on “Settings” at the menu bar at the top and scroll down to the Navigation section. Under “Done/Submit Button Title” and “Progress Bar Title” enter the translated button text. For the progress bar, be sure that your text includes the “{X%}” placeholder. This is necessary to show the survey completion percentage number.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save Settings” and then click on “Preview” at the far right of the menu bar at the top to review our changes.

Perfect! This is exactly how we want our survey to look. The title, question text, button and navigation are all in Arabic and the language direction is from right-to-left. If you have any questions, please let us know in the comments below.