Would anyone have advice about translating data exported from Network Canvas? This would be much appreciated, and I’ve included more information below.
My research team and I have been using Network Canvas to collect egonet data across three European countries. To account for different primary languages among participants, we’ve translated the survey into three different languages. Each translation is an individual interview protocol in Architect which is administered based on the preferred language of the participant.
Now here is the tricky part - seven of our survey questions are short answer/description based. While each individual Research Associate speaks the dominant language(s) in their respective case study, we need to translate all of the responses to English to share across the team and for eventual publication. Network Canvas saves exported .CSV files as read-only for research integrity, but this also makes translation difficult. Has anyone found a work around? What would you suggest?
Just from the outset I want to point out that the CSVs generated by Network Canvas aren’t actually read only. They come in a zip file, but once extracted they can be modified however you wish. You can create copies of them and process them in whatever ways you need.
(and as an aside, even if they were read only, you would still be able to create a mutable copy of the data!)
Because of this, you should have no problem with extracting the questions that need localisation, and then working with them however you wish. I would suggest putting them into a separate CSV/spreadsheet (perhaps one for each language?). My advice would be to structure it with the participants as the rows and the questions as the columns, like this:
ParticipantId
variable_1
variable_2
variable_3
123
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
456
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
789
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Voici un extrait de texte saisi par le participant lors de l’entretien.
Then, you should be able to send these off to one of the many translation services that are available online, or perhaps make use of something in house at your institution if there’s anything available. The online services usually charge by the word. Once you have the translated values, you can either merge them back in, or just reference the translated table whenever you need to.
If you want to automate this process, I can get you started with a script if that would be helpful? I will need to know if you are most comfortable working in Python or R.
Thank you so much for this kind and helpful response - it turns out that the issue with the read-only excel files was not Network Canvas at all, but related to the University computers we are using. Happily, it’s an easy fix and as you say, makes translation a cinch!
