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Introduction to Linguistic Validation
The Linguistic Validation of a questionnaire is a major undertaking. You need to put together a very competent team of people and make sure you have enough time in which to complete the project satisfactorily before you need to use the questionnaire in your study. We would advise you to allow a minimum of 8 months and to be realistic, probably quite a bit more than that.
We do our best to support unfunded researchers, but we have to give priority to funded research. We can’t always respond immediately when the various reports arrive. We will be happy to provide a licence for you to translate a questionnaire if we are confident that your team will be able to produce a translation of the standard that we look for.
Two key people in the team are:
(1) the person co-ordinating the project
(2) the person reconciling the two forward translations.
It is important that the first of these has very good English and that the second has excellent English as well as both being native speakers of the target language of the new translation. We have had experience of dealing with teams where this has been the case and the results have been very good. However, we should add that we do not have the time and resources ourselves to support a team where the necessary criteria cannot be met.
The Linguistic Validation Process in Brief
- Two parallel Forward Translations (FT) by native speakers of the target language, fluent in English and resident in the country where the translation is to be used.
- Review and reconciliations of these two translations into a reconciled FT by a third person, who is a native speaker of the target language and fluent in English.
- Two parallel Backward Translations (BT) independent of each other by native speakers of English and fluent in the target language.
- Review of BT report by the author of the questionnaire, who highlights any concerns.
- Revisions of FT where necessary.
- Review by psychologist and/or clinician to help with choice of illness-related terminology.
- Cognitive debriefing (CD) interviews with a minimum of 5 people with as good a mix as possible eg men and women across a good age range.
- Review by the author, discussion of proposed revisions, final production and proofreading.
For detailed validation and adaptation information, please take the time to read the Linguistic Validation Process
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