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
 

Translating a sensitive orthopaedic diagnostic questionnaire and a health education questionnaire.

Client: The University of Melbourne, Centre for Rheumatic Diseases.

Background

An example of high quality translations is a series of questionnaires from a leading University of Melbourne medical team, developing critical diagnostic and evaluation tools. The University’s Centre for Rheumatic Disease had authored the Multi-attribute Arthritis Prioritisation Tool [MAPT], a psychometrically nuanced questionnaire on degrees and consequences of hip and knee pain that allowed accurate prioritisation of patients for hip and knee replacement operations. The interest in this questionnaire has been international - it will be trialled in Japan and France - as well as being used locally, helping to reduce Victoria’s Orthopaedic Waiting List. In the case of the French version, this was being undertaken by us when the University of Melbourne team also received a translation from their colleagues in France itself, adding a further loop in the methodology described below. For local consumption and potentially international use the Tool was translated from English into Arabic, English into Chinese, English into Croatian, English into Greek, English into Italian, English into Macedonian, English into Maltese, English into Polish, English into Russian, English into Spanish, English into Turkish and English into Vietnamese. These latter translations can be seen at www.oaservice.org.au

Tasks and challenges

The challenge of this translation was to juggle very precise medical diagnostic categories with a natural language questionnaire that could be understood by averagely educated patients in their language. The methodology included:

• Commenting on the original text by language consultants to identify translation issues
• Briefing of forward translators and checkers
• Forward translation and checking by professionally accredited translators
• Back translation by professionally accredited translators
• Comments by the University of Melbourne team on the back-translation
• Comments in turn by the forward and back translators on the University’s comments
• A teleconference to reconcile differences and approve a final version.

Achievement

The successful conclusion of the MAPT translations led to on an even more complex translation, the Health Education Impact Questionnaire [heiQ], which was designed for the evaluation of health education and self-management programs for people with chronic illnesses, providing a standard means of evaluating such program. The domains the questionnaire covers are quite diverse and include general demographic information about the subject, motivation to change risk factors, compliance with medical regimens, coping, general ‘empowerment’ and techniques for self-management. Affect questions intermingle with behavioural and attitudinal items, questions on positive and negative reactions to subject’s health status come along with questions about the worth of the program they have undertaken. These translations were completed with the identical methodology to that outlined above for MAPT.

We have described some translations that are among the most challenging that translators can face. There is sometimes of a misconception that the most difficult translations must be those with the most complicated scientific and technical terminology. In fact, this is not always the case: highly specialised terminology - say, chemical formulae, machinery details or electrical schemas - will often have relatively straightforward equivalences in other languages and often have simple or minimal grammatical complexity; indeed, machine translation is sometimes used for such texts. By contrast, texts that contain psychological, personal or behavioural items need very careful and sympathetic translation; they cannot be done by machine translation, as even such basic issues as pain or mood or self-perceptions can vary widely among or within cultures. This is our specialty.

Meaningful Exchange Translator qualifications

All translators of each language team have a minimum 5 years experience as a professional translator and have NAATI professional accreditation.

Australia has a system of national accreditation for Translators and Interpreters administered by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters [NAATI].

For further information about this project:

Contact: Ismail Akinci, CEO
Phone:1300 854 799
International Phone:+61 (3) 9605 3033
Email: Ismail.akinci@meaningfulexchange.com.au