Correct for Language Preference on Surveys

When surveying consumers about their likes and dislikes, use images of happy and sad faces on the degree-of-agreement scales. That’s the advice from researchers at Erasmus University in the Netherlands. Their advice is directed to situations where the consumers’ primary language is not English, but the questionnaire is being administered in English.
     The researchers’ reasoning is not what you might think. Sure, if the respondents don’t read or understand English well, it makes good sense to provide, in place of words, pictures with universally understood meanings. The smiley face means you like it. The frowning face means you dislike it.
     However, the researchers’ argument is that even when the survey respondents can comprehend English just fine, those who are not native speakers tend to interpret emotion words differently. Specifically, according to findings, they tend to report more intense emotions when answering in a non-native language than when using their favored language.
     “Love” and “hate” don’t feel as strong in the second as in the primary tongue. It loses something in translation. So where the Spanish-speaker might say “disagree somewhat” on the Spanish-language version, he’ll say on the English-language version, “strongly disagree.” Experts on multi-language survey administration have called this the Anchor Contraction Effect (ACE).
     One approach to addressing ACE is to administer consumer attitude surveys in people’s favored languages. However, top-quality translation is expensive. To start, we’ll have a skilled professional translate from English into Spanish, for example. Next, we’ll have another skilled professional, who has never read the original English version, translate from the Spanish back to English. This “back-translation” assesses how well the English-to-Spanish maintained the meaning of the original. We keep at it until the degree of distortion from translation is minimal.
     Using the happy and sad faces is a less expensive approach.
     Another way to reduce the chances respondents ACE the survey questionnaire is to remind them they’re using a nonnative language. The whole personality of the customer changes between languages. Researchers at Baruch College and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee studied what happened to bilingual Hispanic women as they switched between speaking English and speaking Spanish in American settings.
     The researchers found that the women tended to feel more assertive when speaking Spanish than when speaking English. And when these women read English text, as might be used in a survey, they were less likely to take risks, such as exaggerating the statement of their emotions.

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