Category Archives: Tests and Assessments

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Please don’t spend too much time looking up the Chaos Management Skills Assessment. It is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of this informative series on good practice in skills assessments translation. We have collated events and features from several multilingual assessments on which we …

“The Chaos Management Skills Assessment Series: A Test Translation Case Study Episode 1 Retrieving and leveraging existing translations”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village At the recent ATP 2020 global event, a conference gone virtual, our CEO, Steve Dept, presented an innovative approach to test translation and test localisation. He introduced a diagnostic model for a “test travel agent”. Test items do not necessarily take the same translation route: …

“How a test “travel agent” can help identify the most efficient workflows when assessments, or components thereof, don’t all travel the same routes”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village “Does joy, by any other name, in another language, still taste as sweet, and fear still sting as bitter?” asks Marianna Pogosyan, Ph.D. lecturer in Cultural Psychology, in a recent article for Psychology Today. The article refers to a study published in Science where researchers …

“Cross-cultural variations in the meaning of emotions and challenges in translation, especially when the stakes are high”

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) has to be credited with pioneering international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) and with setting the bar very high in terms of methodology. The IEA also shares data and information with education stakeholders, policy-makers, researchers and field practitioners. In this spirit, the new volume edited by Dr …

“IEA involves top researchers and time-served field practitioners in new open access publication on ILSAs”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have opened up enormous opportunities in the field of translation. Today, with a well-designed – hybrid – workflow that combines human expertise and neural machine translation (NMT), it is technically possible to produce multiple language versions of test item banks …

“How to leverage neural machine translation in test item translation”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Functional equivalence of test items across different languages and cultures is essential in order to ensure comparability of data. In the course of our 20+ year experience in linguistic quality assurance (LQA), in particular for major international large scale assessments (ILSAs), we have seen that …

“Redefining the Concept of “Master Version” in Multilingual Test Items by Mitigating the Anglo-Saxon Legacy”

Why psychometricians & linguists need to join forces to improve the validity of multilingual assessments Speakers – Steve Dept, Founder & CEO Recorded Live on Aug 19, 2020 | Duration: 45 minutes Carefully crafted assessment tools too often depend on subtle wording choices, which are expected to trigger certain reactions in respondents (or not). This is …

“On-Demand Webinar | Why psychometricians & linguists need to join forces to improve the validity of multilingual assessments”

Translation Verification for Your Assessments & Surveys: What, Why & How? Speakers – Marielle Lerner, Localization Specialist | Grace DeLee, Localization Specialist | Musab Hayatli, MD-Americas Recorded on July 22, 2020 | Duration: 45 minutes At a previous webinar we discussed the pros and cons of using back-translation to evaluate the quality of your translated tests and questionnaires. We also introduced …

“On-Demand Webinar | Translation Verification for Your Assessments & Surveys: What, Why & How?”

cApStAn Linguistic Quality Control is the language service provider with a holistic approach to  translation and adaptation of multilingual assessments and surveys. cApStAn also stands for a certain lifestyle and spirit: “excellence among friends”, as one of the founding partners likes to put it. Over the past 20 years we have had the privilege of …

“2000-2020. What they say about cApStAn”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village In 1983 Italian academic, historian, semiologist, journalist and author Umberto Eco published his first novel, Il nome della rosa (The name of the rose). The book became a literary event almost overnight and was on the best-seller list practically everywhere for months. It was translated …

“Translating “The name of the Rose”, an example of a linguistic quality assurance process applied to literature”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO When I used to run a small translation agency in the nineties, the majority of my clients were universities. Researchers wrote papers, reports and questionnaires (in elegant French, accurate German, factual Dutch or in rather poor English) and needed them translated. They received documents relevant to their work, written in …

“Chez cApStAn — where great minds come together and share”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Academic institutions worldwide are embracing “STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) education and related curricula, supported in many cases by government funding. The STEM acronym was officially coined in 2001 by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the STEM movement developed in response to growing …

“Trends in learning: STEM, STEAM, STREAM… A battle of acronyms?”