Category Archives: Test translation and localisation

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 Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO cApStAn has made in to the Top 100 on this year’s edition of the Slator LSP Index. We are listed in the category of the “Boutique Language Service Providers”. cApStAn is the only Belgian agency listed in this category, and is in the top 10 as regards growth rate from …

“Breaking news: cApStAn listed in the Slator LSP Index”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO When translating an assessment, a linguistically correct, fluent translation does not ensure that same constructs are measured, that test items are understood the same way or, for that matter, that the fairness, reliability and validity of the test have been maintained. This explains why more sophisticated translation designs are required …

“Why back translation is inadequate to assess quality in a translated test”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO All language service providers will claim that they only work with experienced translators, which is mostly true, but this does not per se ensure translation quality. Serious organisations – and there are many – will invest time in preparing their test translation and adaptation projects thoroughly for multilingual tests: this …

“Multilingual tests: Why adequate training of linguists is a key component of translation quality in test translation and adaptation”