I am in a volunteer (aka zero budget!) position, learning as I go.
I am building a base to hold the list of my college classmates and to manage class communications and an upcoming reunion event. I started with a clean, comprehensive dataset of the members of our class.
I want to send out a preliminary survey (form) to classmates to poll for their interest in our upcoming reunion and, where they ARE interested, their event-related choices (hotel, events, meal choice etc).
We are Canadian so interactions can be in English or in French. Accordingly, the form will have an intial question (Preferred Language? English/French) and, depending on the respondents answer, they will be directed to a form in their preferred language.
When the data comes in, it will be aggregated into a single dataset, for instance, the hotel choices for everyone regardless of their language choice.
My question is how to do this. I see two possible options: a single table with two ‘sets’ of fields - one set for each language; or 2 separate tables - one for each language. (If I have 2 tables, I would probably have 2 separate forms. That would be ok provided I can amalgamate the two into one.)
Perhaps I am missing an even better, or best, solution??
BTW, I am planning to use Fillout.com to create and link the forms.
ANY suggestions or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. As I said, I just joined the community and I am learning as I go!
Many thanks.
Welcome to the community, @JAJH!
Yes, I think that the best idea would be to keep everything in one table, but have 2 sets of fields: one for the French answers and one for the English answers.
Then, in Fillout, you would just need to create one form. Depending on which language the person chooses, you can conditionally show or hide the appropriate fields that you want them to see.
Not sure if you need this or not, but back in Airtable, if you want to see the answers show up in BOTH fields (both English fields and French fields), you can use Make’s DeepL integrations to automatically translate the text from English to French or French to English.
So if somebody submits a form in French, the English translation of their answers will show up in the English fields. And if somebody submits a form in English, the French translation of their answers will show up in the French fields.
Wow Scott. So punctual and so helpful! Many thanks.
The translation facility will not be required (thank you) but I do have another lingering question…
Can you share a word or three to steer me in my investigation about how to combine the two separate, but parallel, sets of data that I will receive into a single dataset? Maybe an automation that when a French language field is populated it gets copied into the parallel English language field in the same record? (I will have to learn how this might work with the various field types?) Or might there be a better way?
Thanks again.
Sure, you can just create an automation that is triggered upon form submission.
Your automation would have conditional actions to update the record: If the language selected is French, update the English fields. If the language selected is English, update the French fields.
You can learn more about updating records via automations here:
And you can learn more about conditional actions here:
Thanks again. Appreciate the support!!
You’re welcome! Glad I could help! 