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Survey people from all over the world and quantify their open-ended answers with our linguistic coding services. Our mother-tongue translators will help you turn sentiment into hard data, regardless of whether your customers are from Brazil, Egypt, or Korea.
Linguistic Coding refers to the process of localizing and coding open-ended survey answers (qualitative data) to enable measuring the results of such surveys (and arrive at quantitative data). This is required when companies survey a large number of people speaking several different languages, but for which they need the same questions answered.
Open-ended questions are those that allow people filling out the surveys to express themselves, for companies to learn more about their specific concerns, as well as the elements they appreciate.
The difficulty with open-ended questions is that sentiments are hard to quantify! And that’s where Open-Ended Survey Coding comes in.
Open-ended surveys are coded by assigning values to the types of answers provided, based on the mention of certain words that tell the algorithm the general inclination of the answer.
Here’s an example: Let’s say we are the owner of a hotel chain called Imaginary Example Hotel, and at the end of every stay, we send our guests a lengthy survey with some open-ended questions.
When asking our guests how they feel about the staff working in our hotel, we apply a code to certain adjectives, with a ranking of importance, from 1 “Very Good” to 5 “Very Bad”:
If we got the following answer:
The code would detect two “number 1” words, and would tag this answer as a solid 1.
If we got this answer, however:
In this answer, the code would detect a “number 3” word, a “number 1” word, and one “number 5” word. In this case, the average of these words would tag this as a “number 3” answer.
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Linguistic coding involves the work of mother-tongue linguistics experts that help localize survey’s answers so that your company can easily quantify data from multiple surveys, for customers from all over the world.
The language team carefully examines open-ended answers and assigns them a value that is present in all the languages your survey has been written on, which means that you’ll know exactly what the general feeling is about your brand. No matter if your clients are from the US, Morocco or Japan!
Let’s continue with the example we had above. This time, let’s say we’re surveying two guests: one from the Philippines and one from France about the staff.
Filipino guest
Here, “maganda” means “nice” (adjective = 2), and “mahal ko” means “I loved”. (adjective = 1), so linguists can assign this a value of 1.5.
French guest
Here, “horribles” means “awful” (adjective = 5), and “désagréables” means “rude” (adjective = 4), so linguists can assign a 4.5 value.
The example above is an oversimplification of a process that can only be accurate when handled by carefully trained language professionals. The work of these specialists is critical. Not only are they the only ones who can understand the semantics of what certain words mean, but they truly appreciate the sentiment that drives a person’s answer, depending on where they’re from.
For instance, an answer containing the same word in Spanish can mean different things depending on if the person is from Buenos Aires (Argentina) or Santa Marta (Colombia).
As a translations company with over 13 years providing language services to customers around the world, we’re the first ones in our industry with the professionals and the technology to offer this service.
