July 2024

Alisú Schoua-Glusberg

Research Support Services Inc.

In the last quarter of the 20th century, survey research began to look into alternative ways to translate and assess questionnaire translations. Back translation appeared as a promising approach and became best practice for a couple of decades. Toward the end of the 1990s, dissatisfaction with this approach led survey researchers with linguistics background to consider and experiment with alternative approaches. This presentation will cover the history of survey translation, problems with back translation, early team translation approaches (e.g. Brislin, Modified Committee Approach), Harkness' (2002) TRAPD model, and implementations of TRAPD, currently considered best practice in the translation of data collection instruments. We will include a discussion of recent literature with experiments comparing different methods and approaches.