Questionnaire translation in a changing world: challenges and opportunities |
|
| Coordinator 1 | Dr Alisú Schoua-Glusberg (Research Support Services) |
| Coordinator 2 | Dr Brita Dr. Dorer (GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Dorothée Behr (GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences) |
With the world becoming more and more globalised and population demographics changing at an ever higher pace, a good quality level of questionnaire translations is increasingly important to develop reliable cross-cultural data.
The digital transition has also been entering the fields of translation in general and questionnaire translation in particular: While good practice recommendation in cross-cultural survey methodology is still to apply team approaches, making sure to involve appropriately trained and experienced questionnaire translation experts, ideally TRAPD (consisting of the steps Translation, Review, Adjudication, Pretesting and Documentation), digital innovations such as Machine Translation or Artificial Intelligence are more and more entering the fields of (questionnaire) translations. Technical innovations related to questionnaire translations can have manifold forms, such as platforms allowing a smooth handling of the workflow to develop, translate and later field questionnaires in manifold languages. Or, for instance, crowd-based translation schemes become more and more popular and may contribute to translating questionnaires too. Where are the strengths and where the weaknesses of such developments? Which role should AI play in the translation of survey instruments?
This session addresses various aspects of questionnaire translation, whether related to digital innovations or not. We invite papers on various topics related to the translation and interpretation of survey instruments, referring for example to: experiments on new techniques or alternative methods, studying challenges of specific language pairs or translation methods. How to translate certain questionnaire elements, such as translating answer scales, approaches to develop questionnaire translations of minority languages, or comparing effects of different translation quality assessment approaches on survey data.