Survey localisation for APAC research programme across seven markets
The client and the project are anonymised throughout.
Sector: Public policy and market research
Language: English <> Simplified Chinese, Cantonese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Urdu
Service: Human Translation & Localisation; human post-editing; Multilingual Data Services
The Challenge
A public policy research consultancy was fielding an opinion survey across seven markets in Asia for a global technology client. Each version had to read naturally to respondents while staying strictly equivalent to the English master. Markets were released in waves as fieldwork was scheduled, and start dates were fixed, so each language had days rather than weeks while the overall schedule kept moving as markets were added.
The Solution
Guildhawk delivered the multilingual surveys as a secure, fully managed translation project:
- Translation was carried out inside the platform's exported spreadsheets, so question identifiers, routing logic and piped placeholders were left intact and only respondent-facing text changed.
- Each language was produced by Guildhawk's in-house machine translation, followed by full human post-editing from a native-speaking linguist in that market.
- The mainland China and Hong Kong samples were treated as separate language versions, and the South and South-East Asian markets were each assigned linguists resident in the market.
- Question stems, scale labels and recurring terminology were matched to earlier waves of the same research programme, so results stay comparable over time.
- Delivery was staged market by market against the client's rolling release, with schedules reissued as markets moved, run by one project team across all seven languages.
The Results
- All seven language versions were delivered as fielding-ready spreadsheets.
- Individual languages were turned around 3 days before the fieldwork start date.
- Scale labels and question stems stayed equivalent across the seven markets, protecting the cross-market comparison at the centre of the study.
Why this matters for research teams running multi-market studies
Splitting seven markets between seven local vendors increases the risk of inconsistent translations, because no one owns consistency across the set. A questionnaire is a measuring instrument, and a loose translation changes what is being measured. When a scale label lands harder in one language than another, or a question is rephrased for fluency, the cross-market comparison at the heart of the study stops working, and the research team usually discovers it at analysis stage, long after fieldwork has been paid for.
Guildhawk delivers multi-market instruments as a single programme: native-speaking linguists in each market, AI-assisted drafting with human post-editing to hold research timelines, terminology carried forward between waves, and survey logic returned intact.
About Guildhawk
Guildhawk is a British language-intelligence company founded in 2001 and headquartered in London. It combines 3,000+ vetted, certified linguists across 200+ languages with proprietary AI built in its own UK Gai Labs, delivering every project with a defensible audit trail. Guildhawk is ISO 27001 certified, a Queen's Award winner and a 2025 Safety and Security Entrepreneur Awards (SSEAs) winner, and processes work inside a secure ISO 27001 confidentiality envelope. Its GAI Suite of proprietary AI tools provides secure, advanced agents for AI translation with 1-click human-in-the-loop, anomaly detection and data anonymisation. Clients include global law firms, life-sciences, energy, financial and government organisations.
