Translation and cultural adaptation of the Aguado Syntax Test (AST) into Brazilian Portuguese

To perform the translation and cultural adaptation of the Aguado Syntax Test (AST) into Brazilian Portuguese considering the linguistic and cultural reality of the language.

The AST assesses the early morphosyntactic development in children aged 3 to 7 in terms of understanding and expression of various types of structures such as sentences, pronouns, verbal voices, comparisons, prepositions and verbal desinence as to number, mode and tense. The process of translation and cultural adaptation followed four steps: 1) preparation of two translations; 2) synthesis of consensual translations; 3) backtranslation; and 4) verification of equivalence between the initial translations and backtranslations that resulted in the final translated version.

The whole process of translation and cultural adaptation revealed the presence of equivalence and reconciliation of the translated items and an almost complete semantic equivalence between the two translations and the absence of consistent translation difficulties.

The AST was translated and culturally adapted into Brazilian Portuguese, constituting the first step towards validation and standardization of the test.