The Multilingual Corpus of Survey Questionnaires [MCSQ] - SSHOC Service Catalogue's Factsheets Series

Multilingual social surveys have become the main source of data to conduct cross-national comparative research. Translation procedures are transitioning to a larger adoption of Computer- Assisted Translation tools, which require the creation of text data.

The MCSQ corpus, the very first publicly available multilingual corpus of international survey texts, performs several functions. It enables the storing, searching and the comparison of information from international social surveys in 9 languages (e.g. French) and 29 of their language varieties (e.g. Swiss French).

The MCSQ constitutes an important new corpus for social scientists, linguists, translators and other interested parties. It has the potential to revolutionize survey research and design by allowing the researcher to consult both previous versions of surveys and also harmonize the same question across languages and language varieties. The Ask the same question method (ASQ) is at the heart of survey design. In the ASQ method, the translated questions in a multilingual survey are supposed to be functionally equivalent for the purpose of statistical analysis, that is, the data should be statistically comparable across linguistic groups. In the ASQ model, the concepts to be measured and the answer options are kept the same across languages, and cultural adaptation is only implemented to facilitate fluency and the use of locally appropriate terminology. Previously there has been no corpus available for ensuring that the same question is asked, and the MCSQ was compiled to fill this function.