How do you survey manufacturing employees who don’t speak English?
Quick answer: Give employees the option to complete the survey in the language they understand best, and make sure the translation preserves the meaning of the original questions rather than simply translating words literally. Survey instructions, confidentiality information, reminders, and response options should be translated too. Manufacturers should then review participation and results by language alongside other workforce segments to identify where language may be affecting the employee experience.
Manufacturers can solve every technical survey-access problem and still miss part of the workforce.
An employee may have a QR code, kiosk, text message, or survey link in front of them. But if the questions are written in a language they do not understand comfortably, access does not equal inclusion.
This matters in a linguistically diverse U.S. workforce. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, 23% of people age 5 and older spoke a language other than English at home, and about 9% spoke English less than “very well.” Those figures describe the broader U.S. population rather than manufacturing specifically, but they illustrate why employers with diverse workforces cannot assume English will be the preferred survey language for everyone.
For manufacturers, the goal should be straightforward:
Every employee should have a meaningful opportunity to understand the questions and provide feedback in a language they are comfortable using.
Multilingual surveying is more than translating the questions
It is tempting to think of a multilingual survey as an English questionnaire that has been converted into Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, or another language.
Good multilingual surveying is more demanding than that.
The U.S. Census Bureau’s guidance for translating data-collection instruments emphasizes that translated questions should be reliable, complete, accurate, culturally appropriate, and equivalent in meaning to the original questionnaire. Its recommended process includes preparation, translation, pretesting, revision, and documentation.
That distinction matters because employee surveys depend on comparability.
If the English version asks whether a supervisor “recognizes good work,” but the translated version implies formal rewards or compensation, employees are no longer answering the same question.
The words may look translated.
The measure is not.
Why literal translation can weaken employee survey data
Survey questions often contain language that is more nuanced than it appears.
Consider statements such as:
- “I feel valued as an employee.”
- “Leadership communicates a clear vision.”
- “My manager provides useful feedback.”
- “My ideas and suggestions are given consideration.”
- “I see opportunities to grow here.”
Each contains concepts that may not translate perfectly word for word.
“Feeling valued” can carry a different connotation from being respected, appreciated, compensated, or recognized. “Feedback” might be interpreted as criticism rather than coaching. “Leadership” may translate ambiguously when an organization needs employees to distinguish senior leadership from their direct supervisor.
A high-quality translation should preserve the concept being measured, not just the vocabulary.
The Census Bureau’s translation guidance specifically calls for semantic, conceptual, and normative equivalence between source and translated survey instruments.
That is especially important when results will later be compared across plants, shifts, departments, or language groups.
Let employees choose the language they understand best
Employers should avoid assuming an employee’s preferred survey language based solely on nationality, name, job, or another demographic characteristic.
Whenever practical, give employees an easy way to select the language in which they are most comfortable responding.
Someone may speak English effectively at work but prefer Spanish for a detailed survey. Another employee may speak one language at home but prefer completing workplace documents in English.
Giving employees a choice does two things.
First, it lowers the cognitive burden of participating.
Second, it reduces the risk that HR is making assumptions about an employee’s language ability.
The objective is not to classify employees.
It is to make answering the survey as clear and comfortable as possible.
Translate the entire survey experience—not just the questions
A common mistake is translating the questionnaire while leaving everything around it in English.
Imagine receiving a survey where the questions are in your preferred language, but the invitation explaining why the company is surveying you is not. The confidentiality statement is in English. The login directions are in English. The reminder message is in English.
Technically, the survey is multilingual.
Practically, the experience is not.
A multilingual listening strategy should consider translating:
- Survey invitations
- Instructions
- Welcome and introduction text
- Questions
- Response scales
- Open-ended prompts
- Confidentiality or anonymity explanations
- Reminder messages
- Help information
- Thank-you messages
- Follow-up communication about results
People Element’s own platform documentation makes this point explicitly: when creating a translated survey, organizations should translate not only the questions and response options but also notification messages and other survey communications.
That consistency helps employees understand both how to participate and why their participation matters.
Translation quality affects whether results can be compared
Manufacturers often want to compare results across plants or workforce groups.
Perhaps one facility has mostly English responses while another has a large Spanish-speaking population. Or one site includes employees completing the same engagement survey in four languages.
Those comparisons are only meaningful when the translated questions measure the same concepts consistently.
This is one reason survey translation deserves more rigor than copying text into a general-purpose translation tool and publishing the result.
The Census Bureau recommends a translation-review process involving multiple perspectives, including translators, reviewers, survey-methodology expertise, and subject-matter knowledge. It also recommends pretesting translated survey materials in the target language.
For an employer survey, the process does not necessarily need to be as extensive as a federal census instrument. But the principle still applies:
Important questions should be reviewed for meaning, clarity, and cultural fit before they are deployed at scale.
Pretest translated surveys with employees who actually speak the language
One of the best ways to catch a confusing translation is to have people from the intended audience review it.
The Census Bureau’s survey-methodology work emphasizes respondent pretesting as an important part of evaluating translated questionnaires—checking whether questions are understood and answered as intended.
For manufacturers, a practical version could mean asking a small group of bilingual employees, trusted reviewers, or language experts to evaluate questions before launch.
Ask:
- Does this question sound natural?
- Is the meaning the same as the English version?
- Is any wording overly formal or unusual?
- Could the question be interpreted in more than one way?
- Are response choices clear?
- Does any workplace terminology need additional context?
A translation can be grammatically correct and still feel unnatural to the people being surveyed.
Pretesting helps catch that before the survey reaches hundreds or thousands of employees.
Keep manufacturing terminology in mind
Manufacturing workplaces often use terminology that creates additional translation challenges.
Employees may regularly hear terms related to:
- Production lines
- Cells
- Shifts
- Leads
- Supervisors
- Quality
- Safety
- Maintenance
- Downtime
- Continuous improvement
- Standard work
- Training
- Advancement
Those terms may have very specific meanings inside one organization.
For example, “leadership” might mean senior executives in an engagement survey, while employees use the term “lead” for a front-line team lead. A literal translation could blur that distinction.
Before deploying a multilingual survey, manufacturers should review whether internal terminology is clear in every offered language.
The goal is not sophisticated wording.
It is shared understanding.
Multilingual access and plant-floor access solve different problems
Language accessibility and survey distribution are closely related, but they should not be treated as the same problem.
Distribution asks:
Can the employee get to the survey?
Language asks:
Can the employee understand and respond to it comfortably?
A manufacturer may need to solve both.
For example, an employee on third shift may need a kiosk or QR code because they do not have corporate email. Once they reach the survey, they may also need the option to complete it in Spanish.
People Element supports employee surveys in 100+ languages, with deployment options including email, SMS, and kiosk access.
For the distribution side of that challenge, see Reaching Plant Floor Employees With HR Surveys
Keeping the two problems distinct helps HR teams design a better listening strategy.
Don't assume offering another language automatically creates trust
Employees must be able to understand a survey.
They also need to believe it is safe to answer honestly.
That can become especially important in smaller language groups.
Suppose only 12 employees at a facility complete the survey in a particular language. If those employees believe leaders can identify them based on language, shift, department, or demographic filters, they may be more cautious about their answers.
Manufacturers should explain confidentiality clearly in the employee’s preferred language and apply appropriate reporting thresholds so results are not broken into groups that are too small to protect respondents.
That may mean combining certain groups for reporting even when the survey itself is available in many languages.
The purpose of multilingual access is to give more employees a voice—not to make individual respondents easier to identify.
Should survey results be segmented by language?
Sometimes—but thoughtfully.
Language can be useful as a diagnostic lens when it helps HR understand whether different employee groups are having meaningfully different experiences.
For example, imagine English-language respondents at a plant report strong onboarding scores, while employees completing the survey in another language report significantly lower clarity around training and job expectations.
That difference could reveal a real employee-experience problem.
Perhaps translated training materials are incomplete. Maybe supervisors communicate differently across groups. Maybe the onboarding process relies heavily on informal interpretation.
But language should not automatically be treated as the cause.
Differences might instead reflect department, shift, role, tenure, manager, or another factor that happens to overlap with language.
Manufacturers should compare language alongside other meaningful workforce segments rather than jumping directly from “the scores differ” to “language explains the difference.”
Open-ended comments create another translation challenge
Rating-scale questions are comparatively straightforward to analyze across languages.
Comments are harder.
An employee may write a response in Spanish, Vietnamese, Mandarin, or another language while HR leaders reviewing the results primarily speak English.
Translating those comments can help leaders understand them, but context matters.
Idioms, slang, manufacturing terminology, tone, and culturally specific phrasing can lose meaning in translation. Sensitive comments about managers, working conditions, or safety deserve particular care.
Organizations should preserve the original comment where possible and treat any translated version as an interpretation of that original text, rather than assuming every phrase maps perfectly into English.
That is especially important when a comment is being used to make a significant personnel or workplace decision.
Multilingual employee listening should happen across the employee lifecycle
Language access should not exist only on the annual engagement survey.
If employees can take the engagement survey in their preferred language but onboarding, stay, or exit surveys are English-only, the organization still has blind spots.
A more complete approach provides multilingual listening at important stages such as:
- Onboarding
- Engagement
- Pulse surveys
- Stay interviews
- Manager feedback
- Exit surveys or interviews
This matters because the questions HR needs to answer change over the employee lifecycle.
A new hire might struggle with translated training or communication. An experienced employee may have concerns about development or leadership. A departing employee may finally be willing to explain an issue they were hesitant to raise earlier.
Language should not determine which parts of that story the organization is able to hear.
Phone interviews can provide another option for multilingual employees
Not every employee is most comfortable expressing detailed feedback through a written questionnaire.
For some workforces, multilingual outbound calls or phone interviews can provide another way to participate—particularly for exit feedback or other situations where a guided conversation is useful.
People Element has long supported both multilingual surveys and outbound survey calling in multiple languages for diverse workforces.
Phone interviewing is not a substitute for translated surveys. It is another option within a broader listening strategy.
The right method depends on the employee population, the type of feedback being collected, and the level of detail the organization needs.
How should manufacturers build a multilingual survey strategy?
Manufacturers should offer employees a choice of survey language, translate the full survey experience, verify that translated questions preserve the original meaning, protect confidentiality across small language groups, and analyze language alongside other workforce segments.
A practical approach includes six steps.
1. Identify the languages employees actually prefer
Use reliable workforce information or let employees select their preferred survey language rather than making assumptions.
2. Translate for meaning, not word-for-word equivalence
Make sure questions measure the same concepts in every language.
3. Translate the surrounding communication
Include invitations, instructions, reminders, confidentiality information, and follow-up messaging.
4. Review and pretest important translations
Use bilingual reviewers or employees familiar with the target language to identify confusing wording before launch.
5. Protect confidentiality in small groups
Set reporting thresholds so language segmentation does not unintentionally identify respondents.
6. Compare results in context
Analyze language alongside shift, location, role, tenure, and manager rather than assuming language itself explains every difference.
Better translation creates better employee data
The goal of multilingual surveying is not simply to say that the organization offers surveys in many languages.
The goal is to collect better information from more of the workforce.
If an employee has to mentally translate every question before deciding how to answer, the survey has created unnecessary friction. If a translated question means something different from the original, the resulting comparison may be misleading. If confidentiality instructions are unclear, employees may withhold the feedback leaders most need to hear.
A strong multilingual survey strategy removes those barriers.
That allows manufacturers to hear from employees based on what they actually think—not based on how comfortable they are interpreting an English questionnaire.
Hear every employee in the language that works for them
People Element helps manufacturers collect employee feedback across diverse workforces with surveys available in 100+ languages and flexible options for reaching employees throughout the employee lifecycle.
Combined with segmentation, reporting, and multiple survey methods, multilingual listening helps manufacturers build a more complete picture of the employee experience across plants, shifts, roles, and workforce groups.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you survey employees who don't speak English?
Offer the survey in the language employees understand best and translate the questions, response scales, instructions, confidentiality information, and survey communications consistently. Employees should be able to select their preferred language whenever practical.
What is a multilingual employee survey?
A multilingual employee survey is the same core survey made available in multiple languages so employees can respond using the language they understand most comfortably. Good multilingual surveys preserve the meaning and measurement intent of each question across languages.
How many languages should an employee survey support?
There is no universal number. Employers should support the languages needed by their workforce. People Element’s employee survey platform supports surveys in 100+ languages.
Can translated survey questions change the results?
Yes. If a translation changes the meaning, tone, or interpretation of a question, employees may effectively be answering a different question. Translation review and pretesting help preserve comparability across languages.
Should manufacturers compare survey results by language?
Language can be a useful segmentation variable when confidentiality thresholds allow, but differences should be interpreted alongside factors such as plant, shift, department, role, tenure, and manager rather than assuming language alone caused the result.
Should survey invitations and reminders also be translated?
Yes. Employees need to understand not only the survey questions but also why they are being surveyed, how to participate, how confidentiality works, and what will happen afterward.
How do you survey multilingual plant-floor employees without company email?
First solve survey access with methods that fit the workforce, such as SMS, kiosks, QR codes, or other frontline-friendly options. Then ensure the survey and its communications are available in the employee’s preferred language. See Reaching Plant Floor Employees With HR Surveys for the plant-floor distribution strategy.
