Back Translations
One service that Meaningful Exchange is able to provide for clients is back-translation, a process that can be of benefit in highly technical or highly sensitive translations.
For most significant translations, Meaningful Exchange would recommend a process of checking, where a translation is checked independently by another translator with equivalent qualifications to the original translator. This process has been important in enabling us to present high quality finished translations; just as the original (usually English) text has been pored over often by several authors, so having two translators translate and check a text ensures quality.
Back-translation takes this process one step further – it gives the client a greater degree of control over and involvement in the translation process. A back-translation gives a sense of whether the meaning of a passage has been adequately translated; in many cases a client may be concerned that a particular phrase, term or concept has been conveyed in the translation; a back-translation process gives this additional confidence to the client that the translation is adequate.
An example of back-translations being used to check on very precise concepts was a translation undertaken by Meaningful Exchange for the Arthritis Foundation of Victoria Centre for Rheumatic Diseases, the Department of Medicine at Royal Melbourne Hospital, and the University of Melbourne. This was a translation of a sensitive diagnostic tool, the Multi-attribute Arthritis Prioritisation Tool [MAPT]; a questionnaire whose results would be used to prioritise patients for hip and knee replacements. Research had shown that the answers to this questionnaire correlated very highly with clinical observations and tests, giving confidence to promote the questionnaire as an accurate diagnostic tool. The authors of the questionnaire were very concerned that the precise degrees of pain and reports of other symptoms referred to in the questionnaire were conveyed accurately in the 12 languages being translated. The clients used the back-translations to clarify how these precise items had been conveyed in the other languages through email exchanges and finally a teleconference with each translator. Further information on these translations is available at www.crd.unimelb.edu.au/academic/projects/oahipknee.html/
Some warnings are in order if using back-translations as a guide to precision. First, as all translators know, but many clients may not immediately recognise, terms and concept in any one language do not match one-for one in another language. Back-translations will often give a variation of what was in the original. It takes some understanding of language to appreciate when the original concept has been translated adequately, even if the same term does not come back in back-translation. Back-translations may also be useful for picking up any inadvertent omissions in translation.
Meaningful Exchange provides project management expertise by briefing all parties on the process, explaining the limits of back-translation and finally sitting in on conversations between clients and translators to give guidance on what may be genuine differences in meaning and what may be differences in expression that still convey the same meaning.
For further information about back translations for your business:
Contact: Uyen Nguyen, Manager, Translations
Phone: 1300 854 799
International Phone:+61 (3) 9605 3099
Email: uyen.nguyen@meaningfulexchange.com.au
