Translating a French dataset to English

[Mansha Mahajan]

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and to working with multilingual datasets so apologies if I'm posting this incorrectly. I have a data set with 456 variables and 517 obs. The entire data set is in French and I want to translate each variable and obs from french to english. I was able to use -unicode translate- to get Stata to read the data set in French but I'm a little lost now as to how I can convert everything to English. I know I can use -rename- and -replace- operations to translate each variable but is there a quicker way to do this. If not, that's ok too. I can try translating the data set in excel but would love to know if there's an easier way to do this in Stata as well.

Thank you,
Mansha

[Dirk Enzmann]

-unicode translate- does no language translation but "only" a translation of character codes. There are some specific characters in French language that are not used in English language. But if the strings of variable labels, value labels or strings in your data are already coded in utf8, most likely you don't need a translation of character codes.

To create variable labels and value labels translated from French into English you first should export the current label definitions into a separate file, translate the labels (I would not trust automatic translation tools such as Google translate!) and then apply the translated labels to your current data set using -label language-. A good explanation how to proceed is given by Jeroen Weesie [see: Wessie, J. (2005). Multilingual datasets. The Stata Journal, 5(2), 162--187.] Perhaps there are other/better tools that I am not aware of.

[Mansha Mahajan]

Ahh, I see. Thanks so much Dirk! Super helpful. I will try this.

Best,
Mansha