Multi-language Surveys

A multi-language survey is one survey with one set of questions, logic and results, carrying a translation for every language you support. You do not duplicate the survey per language, and you do not split your results across several summaries. How a respondent ends up in a given language depends on the survey type:

Survey type	How the language is chosen	If the requested translation is missing
Link survey	The `lang` URL parameter, then the browser language (if enabled), or the respondent picks it in the language switch	Falls back to the browser language (if enabled), then the survey’s default language
App & website survey	The `language` attribute you set through the SDK with `setLanguage()`, otherwise the browser language (if enabled)	The survey is not shown to that user

That difference is deliberate: a link is a public URL that must always render something, while an app survey is targeted at a known user, and showing them a survey in a language they did not ask for is worse than not showing it at all. See Which language a respondent sees for the full rule.

Add languages to your workspace

Languages live on the workspace, so every survey in it can use the same list.

Open the Survey Languages settings

Go to your workspace settings and open Survey Languages:

Survey Languages settings in the workspace

Add a language

Click Edit languages, then Add language, and pick the language from the dropdown. The Identifier is filled in for you — it is the language’s BCP-47 tag, such as de-DE or ar-EG.

Optionally set an Alias: an alternate name you can use instead of the identifier in link survey URLs and in the SDK. It is worth setting when your app already works in tags of its own, such as en_us. A bare two-letter code like de is rejected — it names a language of its own in the picker, so allowing it as another language’s alias would make the two ambiguous. Click Save changes when you are done.

The language itself and its identifier are fixed once the language is created — only the alias stays editable. A language that is still used by a survey cannot be removed; Formbricks lists the surveys that hold it so you can remove it there first.

Activate translations for a survey

Open the Language tab

Open the survey editor and switch to the Language tab.

Turn on Activate translations

Enable Activate translations and pick the survey’s default language. The default language is the one your existing content is already written in.

Choosing the default language is a one-way decision. To change it later you have to switch Activate translations off, which deletes every translation on the survey.

Choose the languages shown

Every workspace language shows up as a row with its Code, a Translated progress bar, and a Shown toggle. Turn Shown on for each language respondents should be able to answer in.A shown language must carry a translation for every required field before the survey can be activated, and before further changes to an active survey can be saved. A draft saves either way, so you can stop mid-translation and come back. If an active survey blocks you, turn Shown off for the unfinished language — the translations you already entered are kept.

The Translated bar counts every translatable string on the survey — headlines, descriptions, choices, placeholders, button labels and ending cards. While a shown language is incomplete, the Language tab carries an amber warning icon so you can see it from any other tab.

Translate your survey content

Once a language is switched on, click its row — or ⋮ → Manage translations — to open the translations editor for that language. It lists every translatable string side by side: the default language on the left, the target language on the right.

Translate with AI

Translate with AI fills in every empty field for the language you have open, in one pass — headlines, descriptions, choices, button labels and all. Strings you have already translated are left untouched, so you can run it again after adding a question and it will only fill the gap.

Open the language you want to fill

Open Manage translations for that language. The button is active as long as there is at least one empty field left to fill.

Click Translate with AI

The translations appear in the right-hand column, formatting and rich text included.

Review, then save

Read the result before you keep it — tone and product terms are the two things worth a second look — edit anything you want to change, and click Save. That hands the translations back to the editor; they are only stored once you save or activate the survey itself.

Translate with AI is an Enterprise feature. It needs Smart functionality (AI) enabled for your organization and a configured AI instance — see AI Features. Without it, the button is disabled and its tooltip says which of the two is missing.

Translate by hand

Type your translations straight into the right-hand column of the same editor. Two things help on a long survey:

Missing first re-sorts the list so untranslated strings come first. Show in order puts it back into survey order.
The ID column tells you where a string lives — 1.1 is the first element of the first block, W is the welcome card — so you can find it again in the editor.

Let respondents switch language

Turn on Show language switch in the Language tab to put a language picker in the survey itself, on every card, so respondents can change language at any point instead of only at the start. It needs at least two visible languages.

Languages are listed by their own name — Deutsch, العربية — rather than translated into the current language, so a respondent can find their own language even if they cannot read the one on screen.

Use the respondent’s browser language

Turn on Use browser language by default in the Language tab, right below Show language switch, and a respondent who arrives without an explicit language sees the survey in their browser’s language — as long as that language is shown on the survey. If none of their browser languages is, the survey opens in its default language. The setting is switched on for you the first time you activate translations on a survey, and switched off again when you deactivate them. It needs at least two visible languages, and it works independently of the language switch: you can open the right language automatically without showing respondents a picker. For link surveys the browser language is read from the request itself, so the survey renders in the right language from the first paint, including when it is embedded on another site. For app and website surveys the SDK reads it from the browser.

Which language a respondent sees

Formbricks picks the survey language in this order:

An explicit language. The lang URL parameter on a link survey, or the language you set with setLanguage() for app and website surveys.
The browser language, only when Use browser language by default is on. Browser languages are tried in the respondent’s order of preference, and each one is matched fully before the next is tried.
The survey’s default language.

What happens when the explicit language matches nothing differs by survey type:

Link surveys fall through to the next step. A mistyped ?lang=xx, or a link to a language you have since hidden, opens in the browser language when the setting is on, and in the default language otherwise.
App and website surveys are the exception: the survey is skipped. If you called setLanguage("fr") and the survey has no visible French, the user does not see it — even when their browser language would match. The browser language is only used when no language was set through the SDK.

How a language is matched

The same matching rules apply to the lang parameter, setLanguage() and every browser language. Matching is case-insensitive, treats _ and - alike, and only ever considers languages that are shown on the survey — plus the survey’s default language, which always matches. The first rule that finds a language wins:

Rule	Example request	Matches survey language
1. Exact identifier	`DE_de`	`de-DE`
2. Exact alias	`brasil`	`pt-BR` with alias `brasil`
3. The same language under its canonical identifier	`pt`, `zh-CN`	`pt-BR`, `zh-Hans-CN`
4. Another regional variant of the same language	`ar`, `en-GB`, `zh-TW`	`ar-SA`, `en-US`, `zh-Hant-TW`

The fourth rule keeps the writing script: zh-TW reaches Traditional Chinese (zh-Hant-TW) and never Simplified (zh-Hans-CN). It also works the other way round — ar-SA reaches a survey that only offers ar-EG. When several variants of the same language are shown, the language’s main variant wins (ar-EG for Arabic, de-DE for German), otherwise the first one in the survey’s language list.

Link surveys

A link survey renders in whatever language the lang URL parameter asks for:

https://app.formbricks.com/s/<survey-id>?lang=de

You do not have to build that URL by hand. Open Distribute and use the language picker next to the survey URL — Formbricks appends the parameter for you, so you can copy one link per language:

Choosing a language for the survey link in the Distribute modal

lang accepts the language’s identifier (de-DE), its alias, or any code that matches one of them — ?lang=de reaches de-DE, ?lang=ar reaches ar-SA, and an old ?lang=pt link still reaches a language since stored as pt-BR. Without a lang parameter — or with one that names a language the survey does not have, or one that is not shown — the survey opens in the respondent’s browser language when Use browser language by default is on and that language is shown, and in its default language otherwise.

In Distribute → Link settings you can also set the link preview title and description per language, so a survey shared in a German-speaking channel previews in German. The preview image is one image for the whole survey — it is not per-language.

App and website surveys

For app and website surveys, the language comes from the user’s language attribute, which you set through the SDK:

Formbricks.setup({
  workspaceId: "<workspace-id>",
  appUrl: "<app-url>", // use PUBLIC_URL if you are using multi-domain setup, otherwise use WEBAPP_URL
});

Formbricks.setLanguage("de-DE"); // identifier or alias of the language

Call setLanguage() whenever your app’s language changes — for example right after the user switches it in your own settings — and Formbricks will use the new value for every survey it shows from then on. setLanguage() accepts the same values as the lang URL parameter — an identifier, an alias, or any code that matches one of them — so setLanguage("ar") reaches a survey language stored as ar-SA, exactly like ?lang=ar.

What happens when a translation is missing

For a survey with more than one language, Formbricks resolves the user’s language attribute like this:

The user’s `language` attribute	What the user sees
Not set	The survey in the browser language when Use browser language by default is on and it matches, otherwise in its default language
Matches the survey’s default language	The survey in its default language
Matches a visible language on the survey	The survey in that language
Matches nothing on the survey, or a language that is not visible	Nothing — the survey is skipped, whatever the browser language

The last row is deliberate: a targeted survey is skipped rather than shown in a language the user did not ask for. A survey with only one language, or with translations switched off entirely, is exempt — it ignores the language attribute and is shown to a matching user whatever their language is set to.

Right-to-left languages

Right-to-left languages need no configuration. When the active language is an RTL one — Arabic, Hebrew, Persian or Urdu — the whole survey mirrors itself: text alignment, progress bar, rating scales, button placement and the language switch.

A survey rendered in Arabic, right to left

Built-in interface translations

Beyond the content you translate yourself, every survey ships with a set of built-in interface strings that Formbricks localizes automatically — so respondents see them in their own language without any extra work from you. These include:

Default navigation and action buttons (Back, Next, Finish)
Form validation messages (e.g. “Please fill out this field”, “Please enter a valid email address”)
File-upload prompts and states
Offline, retry, and “sending responses” notices
Attribution and helper labels like “Powered by” and “Required”

These built-in strings are currently provided in 25 languages:

Language	Code	Language	Code
English (base)	`en-US`	Japanese	`ja-JP`
Arabic	`ar-EG`	Khmer	`km-KH`
Chinese (Simplified)	`zh-Hans-CN`	Nepali	`ne-NP`
Chinese (Traditional)	`zh-Hant-TW`	Portuguese (Brazil)	`pt-BR`
Danish	`da-DK`	Romanian	`ro-RO`
Dutch	`nl-NL`	Russian	`ru-RU`
Estonian	`et-EE`	Spanish	`es-ES`
French	`fr-FR`	Swedish	`sv-SE`
German	`de-DE`	Turkish	`tr-TR`
Hindi	`hi-IN`	Urdu	`ur-PK`
Hungarian	`hu-HU`	Uzbek	`uz-UZ`
Indonesian	`id-ID`	Vietnamese	`vi-VN`
Italian	`it-IT`

Formbricks matches the survey’s active language to the closest available bundle — for example, de-AT and de both use the German bundle, and pt-PT uses pt-BR. Writing script is preserved when matching, so zh-Hant and zh-TW resolve to the Traditional Chinese bundle rather than the Simplified one. If a language has no matching bundle, your translated survey content is still shown as usual, but these built-in interface strings fall back to English.

Don’t see your language? These interface translations live in the open-source @formbricks/surveys package. You can add a new one by contributing a locale file on GitHub.

Analyzing multi-language responses

Every response records the language it was answered in, so you can:

Filter responses by Language on the summary and responses pages
See the language of a single response on its response card

Choice answers are stored in the language the respondent used, and the summary maps them back to the default-language choice — so one bar per choice, counted across all languages, rather than one bar per language.

Need help? Reach out in Github Discussions

Overview

Survey Features

Best Practices

Add languages to your workspace

Activate translations for a survey