cApStAn and Enovate Joining Forces
Why cApStAn?
A Platform Built for Flexibility, with the Power of Language Solutions
Test owners, credentialing organisations, survey directors and awarding bodies have experienced the challenge of administering digital assessments in multiple languages. Validity, reliability, fairness and comparability are not always compatible with the usual constraints of localisation.
At cApStAn, we have helped address the test and questionnaire translation challenge for 26 years. What we have observed is that platforms are designed without taking diversity and multilingualism into account from the outset. Most test delivery platforms accommodate multiple languages, but very few are flexible enough to allow for that sweet spot where linguists can make the most of translation technology while applying best practices in test translation and adaptation. We have been on a mission to bridge that gap. We have built connectors and APIs, implemented hundreds of sophisticated workflows involving export and re-import of structured data formats.
In offering an integrated service in the form of a platform built to make multilingual test administration seamless, we hope to make the lives of many people easier: now we have your back from test design to roll-out, and all the way to analysis of test and questionnaire results. We set up bespoke SLAs for updates, versioning, item bank management and translation memory maintenance.
Why Enovate?
Linguistic Expertise Meets Advanced Assessment Platform
Twenty-three years ago, the initial demands that laid the foundation of the Enovate platform were a need for more flexibility in development and a growing interest in user experience. Whenever we built something, we knew we would need to adapt it, tweak it, add and modify functionalities. Versatility is part of our DNA. We connect, we integrate, and we make end-to-end test administration seem easy.
One of the components of testing that has always intrigued us is language. Do subject matter experts who write exam questions know how to tailor the language to the candidates they aim to assess? How does one ensure that a test measures what it intends to measure? We have hosted and delivered tests in several languages, and we had that nagging feeling that linguistic expertise would contribute a lot to the quality of the items.
So, we joined forces with one of the world’s most experienced linguistic quality assurance organisations, we integrated their tool set and their processes into our platform, and what we offer today is end-to-end support of multilingual testing, with built-in, automated item health checks, on-the-fly translation with on-demand validation, piloting, post-pilot editing and trend content management.
Meet TAlly: A Built-In, Automated Item Health Check
Your new certification exam is almost ready. It is written in the dominant language but will be deployed in minority languages as well, and there is interest to administer it in several other markets. Your team has authored it in the sandbox environment of the Enovate platform. You have very little time for the cultural review: you intend to pilot the master version next week and to translate the items in three weeks. Imagine that you can, by the push of a button, have an automated translatability report and health check on your items, without leaving the platform. The first feedback can be available the same day, with an actionable report. Ambiguity, unnecessary complexity, double-barrelled questions, logical problems or potential cultural issues reported. If you wait for the second report a few days later, language experts will have refined it, eliminated some false positives and supplemented it with their own expert input. All within the Enovate platform. That is now possible since we integrate cApStAn’s Tally process in our test authoring environment.
It is not merely a technical integration: it allows these checks to occur earlier in the item life cycle: item writers and reviewers do not need to wait until their items are almost final to submit them for review cycles. They can receive feedback while developing content, several times along the process if they wish. Cultural reviews and translatability assessments become part of normal item development rather than an additional process layer.
When these processes take place in the authoring environment, it becomes easier to enforce traceability and systematic documentation of review decisions within the same platform.
Request Translations Directly from the Enovate Platform
Now your test is ready and needs to be translated, adapted, localised for a dozen languages. Imagine that you don’t need to look for a vendor. You can request the translation directly from the platform’s environment. Your initial automated translation is available almost in real time, with a confidence label that tells you whether the quality is good, acceptable, or inadequate.
Then you can choose from a series of translation and quality assurance designs, from post-edition of the automated translation to full compliance with gold standard: team translation as described in the International Test Commission’s Guidelines for translating and adapting tests. Each workflow begins in the platform and ends in the platform. Totally secure. Nobody downloads. The experts and the linguists receive credentials to access the specific section of the cloud-based translation environment that they need to access to complete their task. Mature translation technology is leveraged within that secure environment. You, as test owner, have the possibility to comment, to request further revisions, to pilot the translated versions and to initiate additional editing procedures. cApStAn’s language experts and Enovate’s developers work together to make this a seamless experience. You can choose to include candidate communication in the process, with a light translation workflow, or not. Multilingual test administration made easy.
The Most Secure Ecosystem for Multilingual Testing
A salient feature of this ecosystem is its robust architecture for secure workflow management. Credentials allow users to access the component that they need to work on and to access only the metadata they need, without downloading, without exiting the environment. Both in monolingual and in multilingual test settings, traceability and versioning are enforced by default and reinforced on demand.
With Enovate’s support for Safe Exam Browser (SEB) at the test setup level, each test centre can choose to use the Safe Browser or not, and even on which language versions of the test to use it. Language-specific configuration of the SEB is in the pipeline.