How to display a Google Form in a particular language | Social Signal

Update: Something's changed at Google's end, and this tip no longer works... at least, not in the four browsers I checked it in. I'll be on the lookout for workarounds, but in the meantime, any suggestions are welcome. And thanks to the commenters who've pointed it out.

Google Forms are one of the lesser-known and more powerful features of Google Docs. They let you capture data from your users in a Google Spreadsheet, via simple web-based forms that can stand on their own or sit embedded in a web page. Like this:

Now, suppose you need to create that form in, say, English and French. Not hard: two forms, two spreadsheets, and you're done. But when you look at the French version, the questions may be in French but all of the interface text is still in English:

Here's how you fix that: just change the URL for the form by adding a parameter for the language you want the form to appear in... in our case, "fr" for French.

This is the original embed code that Google creates for the form:

Change that source URL to read http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?key=pnY7RN2L8C5h3PQUcS0RKIg&hl=fr. Adding &hl=fr is all it takes:

You can find a list of codes for each of the languages Google supports here, from Afrikaans (af) to Zulu (zu).