Creating Forms in Hindi, German and More!

By Sumukh Barve -

Did you know that you can use Polydojo to create forms in practically any language? Yes you can! That's because Unicode is fully supported on the platform.

To create forms in a foreign language, you simply need your keyboard to support that language. Likewise, form submissions can also be entered in any language.

Multilingual Forms

Not only can you create forms in any given language, you can create multilingual forms! For simplicity and clarity, we’ll soon take up an example.
Polydojo is made in Mumbai, India. Almost all local users speak Hindi. We also have quite a few users from Germany and Switzerland, who primarily speak German.

In a previous post, we explored how long contact forms are difficult to fill; and the fields an ideal contact form should include. We created an English-only contact form. Today, we’ll add Hindi and German labels, making it trilingual.

Starting Point

Let’s start with the contact form we’d built before. Here’s a screenshot:


Typing in Foreign Scripts (using Google Translate)

In India, US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand and Poland; most keyboards don’t include non-English characters. Hence, typing in Hindi, Greek, German etc. can be difficult.

Typing in Hindi (हिंदी)

Traditionally, typing in Hindi (Devnagri) requires special software and training. But there’s another way to (sort-of) type in Hindi. You can simply use Google Translate.

Go to translate.google.com and choose the base language as Hindi. Then, if you type Naam followed by a space, you’ll get नाम. Basically, you can use Google Translate as a phonetic-based Devnagri generator.
Aside: नाम, pronounced ‘naa-m’, means ‘name’ in Hindi.

Typing in German (Deutsch)

If you use a standard English keyboard, ß and umlauts won’t be a part of it. Don’t worry. Again, you can use Google Translate.

Select German as the base language. Then, as you type Stra, Google Translate will offer to auto-complete to Straße. You needn’t have the ß character on your keyboard.

Aside: Straße, pronounced ‘sht-ra-sse’, means ‘street’ in German.

Google Input Tools

If you often find yourself using Google Translate to type in foreign scripts, we recommend using Google Input Tools. It’ll save you a lot of time. We won’t delve into details here. To learn more, please follow the preceding link.

Going Multilingual

Now, while you can use Google Translate to type in foreign scripts; don’t forget that you also can use it to translate from English to foreign languages. In other words, why not use Google Translate to help translate your form?

Google Search includes a translate widget. If a search for “English to Hindi”, a mini-version of Google Translate will open-up. In the following screenshot, such a mini-version has been used.

Changing The Title

The title of our original form was “Contact Us”. Let’s translate that to Hindi and German.



Similarly, translating to German yields “Kontaktiere uns”. If you don’t like the translated version, no worries. Use the technique discussed above to type directly in the Hindi or German.

Now, in the form builder, change the form’s title. Doing so is simple, just copy-paste! For clarity, we’ve used slashes to separate the languages. Here’s a screenshot:


Changing The Fields

Alright! The title has been taken care of. Now, it’s time to translate each field. Let’s start with the Name field. We’ll take care to translate the label and also the help text.

Shortening the help text a bit and using Google Translate, you can quickly edit the Name field to become:


The Final Picture

Similarly, by translating the other fields and making minor edits, you can easily get the following:



Note that the above screenshot is of the finished form, taken from its permanent URL. The preceding two screenshots were taken from Polydojo’s form builder.

Wasn’t That Easy!?

This article seems long only because it includes a bunch of screenshots. Otherwise, it’s quite short. Once you’ve got a hang of using Google Translate to create multilingual forms, translating a single form should take only a few minutes.

We hope that you found this post helpful. If you have any comments or suggestions, please use the comments area below or write to me at sumukhbarve@polydojo.com.


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Image credit: Oomhp (oomphinc.com)

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