Translating and Transcribing

In this release we have improved support for translating answers to questions from one language to another.  For example from French to English.  You can use the same feature to facilitate transcribing to text from an audio recording or a video.

Specify the source parameter in an Oversight form

For example if you have an audio question called q2 and you want to write the translation into a column called audio_transcription, then you can write your oversight form as shown below.

Oversight Form

The parameter source=q2 has been added to the audio_transcription column.  Clicking on a record in managed forms then shows a page similar to the one below where the user can play the audio and write the translation.

You can also reference:

•  a text question in order to convert from one language to another.
• an image question to write commentary on an image
• and a video question in order to add commentary and a transcription.

Other Parameters

Parameters for oversight forms are new in version 17.09.  Other parameters are:

• rows=a number.   This sets the number of rows to show when entering data for a text column.   In the above example the number of rows were set to 3.  However you can click on the bottom right-hand corner of the text box to make it smaller or larger at any time.
• form_data=off  or form_data=on.   This is applied to a new row type called settings.  When set to off the form data for the selected record is not displayed which is useful when you are focussed on referencing specific questions.

Monitoring of Submitted Results

A new result type of “Upload Errors” has been added.  The background to this is that previously a change was made to the monitor to show errors that occur when the results of a survey are submitted and are reported back to the phone or webform.  Commonly these are due to a survey being blocked or deleted. However these errors are generally fixed directly by the users.  For example they will see an error on their phone because the survey is blocked.  The survey will then be unblocked and the user will re-submit.  All is good.  However the monitor page will then show 1 succesfull upload and 1 error.

It is still useful to see if there have been any errors in uploading results.  The new type of “Upload Errors” shows these.  These errors are just informational and should align with errors reported on the phone.   The “Errors” column will continue to show uploads that were accepted by the server but then  for some reason failed to get applied to the database.  These are the sort of errors where you might say “where is my data?” and are more significant.

The second change made to the monitor page is to always show the latest name of a survey.  Previously if you submitted 10 results to a survey then changed its name then submitted 10 more you would see two rows for the two survey names with 10 uploads each.  Now you will see one row and it will be for the latest survey name and have 20 uploads.

Other Changes

• Add hyper links to video and audio answers when generating PDFs of submitted data.
• When filtering by data values in field analysis the list of values to select in now sorted alphabetically
• Added “nochoose” to video and audio questions. Previously this only worked for image questions.  If set then when completing a form with image, audio or video questions the user will not be prompted to add media from the phones sdcard.
• Added another column called “upload Errors” to the monitor page that shows the status of submitted results.  In a previous change we had started showing