scholarly journals Translation as an Ecological Tool for Instrument Development

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 40-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrey Vinokurov ◽  
Daniel Geller ◽  
Tamara L. Martin

In this paper the authors outline the translation process involved in Macro International's evaluation of the Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia. IVLP is a long-running program in which professionals and prospective leaders from around the world participate in funded short-term visits to the United States to learn first-hand professional practices and values of American society and democracy. The authors highlight the importance of attending to the theoretical issues in, discuss contextual factors inherent in, and outline specific phases of the translation process, and present the modified decentering translation technique adapted for the project. They describe the types of translation equivalencies that were addressed and present findings that attest to the quality of the translation. They underscore the importance of the translation process as a qualitative tool for the instrument development that maps the contexts of people's lives, documents emic-etic aspects of cross-cultural research, and fosters collaborations with all stakeholders of the research project.

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Colina ◽  
Nicole Marrone ◽  
Maia Ingram ◽  
Daisey Sánchez

As international research studies become more commonplace, the importance of developing multilingual research instruments continues to increase and with it that of translated materials. It is therefore not unexpected that assessing the quality of translated materials (e.g., research instruments, questionnaires, etc.) has become essential to cross-cultural research, given that the reliability and validity of the research findings crucially depend on the translated instruments. In some fields (e.g., public health and medicine), the quality of translated instruments can also impact the effectiveness and success of interventions and public campaigns. Back-translation (BT) is a commonly used quality assessment tool in cross-cultural research. This quality assurance technique consists of (a) translation (target text [TT1]) of the source text (ST), (b) translation (TT2) of TT1 back into the source language, and (c) comparison of TT2 with ST to make sure there are no discrepancies. The accuracy of the BT with respect to the source is supposed to reflect equivalence/accuracy of the TT. This article shows how the use of BT as a translation quality assessment method can have a detrimental effect on a research study and proposes alternatives to BT. One alternative is illustrated on the basis of the translation and quality assessment methods used in a research study on hearing loss carried out in a border community in the southwest of the United States.


Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 396
Author(s):  
Jamie Lynn Goodwin ◽  
Andrew Lloyd Williams ◽  
Patricia Snell Herzog

Since 2010, scholars have made major contributions to cross-cultural research, especially regarding similarities and differences across world regions and countries in people’s values, beliefs, and morality. This paper accumulates and analyzes extant multi-national and quantitative studies of these facets of global culture. The paper begins with a summary of the modern history of cross-cultural research, then systematically reviews major empirical studies published since 2010, and next analyzes extant approaches to interpret how the constructs of belief, morality, and values have been theorized and operationalized. The analysis reveals that the field of cross-cultural studies remains dominated by Western approaches, especially studies developed and deployed from the United States and Western Europe. While numerous surveys have been translated and employed for data collection in countries beyond the U.S. and Western Europe, several countries remain under-studied, and the field lacks approaches that were developed within the countries of interest. The paper concludes by outlining future directions for the study of cross-cultural research. To progress from the colonialist past embedded within cross-cultural research, in which scholars from the U.S. and Western Europe export research tools to other world regions, the field needs to expand to include studies locally developed and deployed within more countries and world regions.


2020 ◽  
pp. 107484072097516
Author(s):  
Marcia Van Riper ◽  
George J. Knafl ◽  
Maria do Céu Barbieri-Figueiredo ◽  
Maria Caples ◽  
Hyunkyung Choi ◽  
...  

Down syndrome (DS) is the most common genetic cause of intellectual disability worldwide. The purpose of this analysis was to determine the internal consistency reliability of eight language versions of the Family Management Measure (FaMM) and compare family management of DS across cultures. A total of 2,740 parents of individuals with DS from 11 countries completed the FaMM. The analysis provided evidence of internal consistency reliability exceeding .70 for four of six FaMM scales for the entire sample. Across countries, there was a pattern of positive family management. Cross-cultural comparisons revealed parents from Brazil, Spain, and the United States had the most positive family management and respondents from Ireland, Italy, Japan, and Korea had the least positive. The rankings were mixed for the four remaining countries. These findings provide evidence of overall strong internal consistency reliability of the FaMM. More cross-cultural research is needed to understand how social determinants of health influence family management in families of individuals with DS.


Author(s):  
Thanh Tran ◽  
Tam Nguyen ◽  
Keith Chan

Given the demographic changes and the reality of cultural diversity in the United States and other parts of the world today, social work researchers are increasingly aware of the need to conduct cross-cultural research and evaluation, whether for hypothesis testing or for outcome evaluation. This book’s aims are twofold: to provide an overview of issues and techniques relevant to the development of cross-cultural measures and to provide readers with a step-by-step approach to the assessment of cross-cultural equivalence of measurement properties. There is no discussion of statistical theory and principles underlying the statistical techniques presented in this book. Rather, this book is concerned with applied theories and principles of cross-cultural research, and draws information from existing work in the social sciences, public domain secondary data, and primary data from the author’s research. In this second edition, several changes have been made throughout the book and a new chapter on item response theory has been added. The chapter on developing new cross-cultural instrument has also been expanded with a concrete example.


2004 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 351-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda G. Bell ◽  
Hisako Dendo ◽  
Yonro Nakata ◽  
David C. Bell ◽  
Tsunetsugu Munakata ◽  
...  

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