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[The translation of questionnaires and of tests: techniques and problems]
Catherine Massoubre1, François Lang, Burkard Jaeger
1Service de psychiatrie adulte, C.H.U. de Saint-Etienne, Hôpital Bellevue, 42055 Saint-Etienne, France.
Objectives:
To summarize the difficulties involved in translating tests, to describe the translation methods and the test validation procedures, and to apply those to a personality test.
Method:
The revised Freiburg Personality Inventory (FPI-R) was translated, then subjected to the following test validation methods: backtranslation, pretest, and review by a carefully selected expert committee.
Results:
We used a literature review to clarify FPI-R translation problems. These include in particular the different types of equivalence between the source language and the target language (for example, semantics and idioms, as well as experiential and conceptual equivalence). Statistical validation procedures are employed in principle only.
Conclusion:
The current method combining translation with backtranslation is not sufficient and must be used with, at least, a pretest and step-by-step review by an expert committee. The presence of unilingual experts to explain the smallest details of the target language, which bilingual experts could miss, seems to be mandatory.