Lost in translation

Good Morning ! Bonjour ! Buenos dias! Guten Morgen… How to communicate effectively with our colleagues inside an international organisation? Is my dashboard will be understood by all by colleague across the globe… the solution : a multilingual dashboard !

Because English is not my native language, I felt always apart when vizzing in Tableau Public. Is my french humor will be understood by English people? Am I writing with so many gramatical errors that my readors are bored?

That is why, since several vizzes I am trying to do multilingual Dashboards. Here I will show some techniques that I used in the past.

1- Duplicate your work.

One possibility, probably the easiest one, it do a dashboard for each language, and depending of an action on a landing page, to drive the reader to one dashboard or another. But of course that also mean to duplicate your work, and to have several identical dashboards inside your workbook, which can easily lead of having 50-100 worksheets with the consequences in term of performance.

2- Use of a parameter to switch between languages :

On my Tintin’s viz click, I wanted an easy switch between the different language.

English view

French view

Because I was competing on the Tableau Ironviz competition, i wanted an elegant and performant solution, so I decided to do an easy implementation by creating a parameter.

Each time the parameter is hit, the full dashboard is updated. Because each calculation, titles, tooltips displays a different text depending of the value of the parameter.

For instance a title calculation could be as simple as :

if [language]=”French” then “Disparition d’un personnage pendant l’intrigue”
ELSE “Disparition of a character during the plot”
END

or as complicated as

if [language]=”French” then
“Dans “+ ATTR([albums (tintin)].[album francais])+” album n°”+ ATTR(STR([ID]))+”, “+ATTR([personnages])+” est présent sur la page n°”+STR(ATTR([Planches]))
ELSE
“In “+ ATTR([albums (tintin)].[album anglais])+” book n°”+ ATTR(STR([ID]))+”, “+ATTR([personnages])+” is present on the page n°”+STR(ATTR([Planches]))
END

The purpose of this is that the display of the tooltip in french or english always keep a certain meaning.

This solution can seem tricky, but what is the life without a challenge 🙂

3. Set actions

For Christmas I wanted to do a viz to bring awareness about Reindeers, to demonstrate how this specie is undangered. After some reflexion it seems interesting to me to present the viz as a Christmas Card. link

Because I wanted to reach as many people as possible, I decided to deliver the dashboard in different languages. I was wondering if the set actions can help me on doing a better job than the parameters.

First you need to create a set based on the field language

And then create a set action changing the language set when clicking on the Christmas greeting on the card (red image).

For instance clicking on “Joyeux Noel” will open the card and reveals the french message

Following the same schema, clicking on the German greeting, will open the card in German.

Here is the trick. You have to duplicate your data according to the number of languages you want to include. As you can see below the title of the graph is in englisg when the language is in english, and the value is in french when language is french…