Multilinguality

Surveys within the EU are often addressed to all EU citizens. This means that the texts in the survey, i.e. the description of the survey, the questions, and the possible responses should all be available in each of the national languages. Users can choose their preferred language, which significantly boosts the acceptance rate of the survey. This is one aspect of multilingual software: one and the same program can appear in the user interface in each of the desired languages.

Another aspect of multilinguality concerns user entries, i.e., user responses may be entered using any EU language, independent of the language that the user has chosen for the interface. These facets of multilinguality function not only within the EU, but also worldwide: a user in Asia who uses a Chinese version of MS Windows could, for example, opt to have a survey displayed in French and enter responses in German, in which case the French accented characters and German umlauts would be correctly displayed.

The reason these processes work is the Unicode Standard. It ensures that, across the globe, an “A” is a capital A from the Latin alphabet, and that an “ß” is a sharp S, etc. Not only are letters standardized, but so are today’s much loved emojis. Unicode ensures that a smiley on an Android phone stays a smiley on an iPhone.

Due to our experience with multilingual texts in the context of various EU institutions, we’ve had a hand in shaping the development of the Unicode Standard character sets: our contributions have entered into the considerations for the standardization of the Unicode character set. Our competence in this domain is in regular demand from EU institutions, which has always striven to incorporate the particular character sets and sorting rules brought in by each new member state.