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Session Details

Questionnaire translation is a field within cross-cultural survey research that has been receiving increasing interest within the past decades, as the importance of high-quality and comparable questionnaire translations has become more and more obvious for 3mc studies, both cross national and within country cross-cultural research. While in the earlier stages, approaches such as simply back-translating translated questionnaires and comparing to the source text were routinely applied, ever more sophisticated methods have been developed over the last 10-20 years. Team or committee approaches, as implementations of Janet Harkness' TRAPD model, (e.g. by the European Social Survey (ESS) or SHARE), have become the norm in many multilingual projects. New approaches for assessing and improving translation quality have been added, and research on how to make use of new technological developments in translation sciences, such as Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools, Machine Translation (MT), or Speech Recognition, has been under way.

This session invites papers on a wide variety of aspects of questionnaire translation. Examples of topics may include topics or research questions from within the classical linguistic and translation research fields, such as certain translation issues or linguistic patterns in individual language pairs; discussing existing or new methods and tools for assessing or improving translation quality; aspects of the source questionnaire that affect its translation into multiple language versions; the interplay between translation and adaptation in the context of questionnaire translation; or intercultural factors affecting questionnaire translation in the cross-cultural survey context.