Heart Attacks, Bloody Noses, and Other "Emotional Problems": Cultural and Conceptual Issues With the Spanish Translation of Self-Report Emotional Health Items.

This article examines how respondents understood items in the Spanish versions of the Short-Form 36 (SF-36v2). Cognitive interviews of the SF-36 were conducted in 2 phases with 46 Spanish speakers living in the United States. Roughly one-third (17/46) of respondents had difficulty understanding the Role Emotional items upon their initial reading, and almost half (21/46) provided examples that were inconsistent with the intended meaning of the items. The findings of this study underscore the importance of conducting cognitive testing to ensure conceptual equivalence of any instrument regardless of how well validated it appears to be.

Translating questionnaire items for a multi-lingual worker population: the iterative process of translation and cognitive interviews with English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking workers.

BACKGROUND: The increasing ethnic diversity of the US workforce has created a need for research tools that can be used with multi-lingual worker populations. Developing multi-language questionnaire items is a complex process; however, very little has been documented in the literature. METHODS: Commonly used English items from the Job Content Questionnaire and Quality of Work Life Questionnaire were translated by two interdisciplinary bilingual teams and cognitively tested in interviews with English-, Spanish-, and Chinese-speaking workers. RESULTS: Common problems across languages mainly concerned response format. Language-specific problems required more conceptual than literal translations. Some items were better understood by non-English speakers than by English speakers. De-centering (i.e., modifying the English original to correspond with translation) produced better understanding for one item. CONCLUSIONS: Translating questionnaire items and achieving equivalence across languages require various kinds of expertise. Backward translation itself is not sufficient. More research efforts should be concentrated on qualitative approaches to developing useful research tools.