OECD PISA – Programme for International Student Assessment
What is PISA?
Over half a million 15-year-olds from over 90 countries and economies across the world took the most recent edition of the PISA test: the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment. It measures knowledge and skills in reading, mathematics and science, and assesses competencies in innovative domains.
The importance of the PISA data cannot be understated. This is a critical initiative for the OECD and policymakers worldwide to identify trends and inform education policies and reforms.
Scope, Process, Impact — by the Numbers
Behind the scenes
Translation technology is key: before the translation begins, the master version is optimised and content is separated from layout. Automated QA procedures and workflows ensure end-to-end efficiency and meet stringent security standards. We focus on interoperability and standardisation. For PISA, cApStAn has customised an open source translation editor to accommodate a sophisticated double translation workflow.
Challenges
Here at cApStAn, we’ve risen to this challenge and have been the OECD’s trusted partner for over 25 years. In fact, we’ve taken lead responsibility for linguistic quality assurance of all PISA survey instruments ever created.
We know that this challenge doesn’t just mean adapting the PISA tests into over 100 languages and locales and supporting the translation teams throughout the process.
It also means mastery of translation middleware, harnessing state of the art translation technology and making it available to country teams as well as to our expert linguists. Their task will be to verify the materials using cApStAn’s own evaluation framework and provide structured feedback.
In their hands, our tools work wonders at ensuring that their expertise is applied consistently and efficiently, thus ensuring the highest quality and cross-language comparability of the assessment instruments.
Successful Outcome
The ultimate goal of any translation in the field of data collection is of course ensuring cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparability.
At cApStAn, we regard that as our principal achievement of over 25 years!
Want to try this out on your materials?
Select some sample items or sample questions, and request a free pilot at hermes@capstan.be or contact us via the form below for more details.