Category Archives: Surveys and Opinion Polls

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village How do you define “translation quality”? How can it be measured? In a recent live webinar cApStAn’s CEO Steve Dept explained how “intervention categories” used in a translation verification process can help report on translation quality in a standardized way and generate meaningful statistics. Translation …

“What are “intervention categories” and how can revisers use them to improve translation quality?”

by Andrea Ferrari – Senior Associate In international surveys in general and in comparative assessments in particular, investigators are interested in collecting data about knowledge, skills and competences of a given population at a given point in time. In addition, if periodical data collections are planned, it is of great interest to also measure change …

“Trend Measurement in International Assessment Surveys”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A patent filing by Swiss pharma company IBSA (Institut Biochimique S.A.) has been rejected in a US Court ruling which found that the certified English translation of the Italian term semiliquido was “indefinite”, as the English term “half-liquid” could be construed as several things. This …

“Rejection of patent filing could have been avoided with a translatablity assessment”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Readers of this informative series on good practice in survey translation are aware that the Economic Migration Barometer is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of the series. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of survey translation and the added value of a robust …

“The Economic Migration Barometer Series: A Survey Translation Case Study Episode 4 – Linguistic Quality Assurance and Optical Check”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO By now, readers of this informative series on good practice in survey translation are aware that the Economic Migration Barometer is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of the series. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of survey translation and the added value of …

“The Economic Migration Barometer Series: A Survey Translation Case Study Episode 3 – Translation Technology and Support to translators”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO By now, readers of this informative series on good practice in Economic Migration survey adaptation and translation are aware that the Economic Migration Barometer is a fictitious project, which we set up for the exclusive purpose of the series. The purpose is to illustrate the complexity of survey translation and …

“The Economic Migration Barometer Series: A survey adaptation Case Study Episode 2 – Translatability Assessment and Q-by-Q Translation and Adaptation Notes”

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

“The Economic Migration Barometer Series: A multilingual survey translation Case Study Episode 1 – Retrieving and leveraging existing translations”

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 To quote scholars Barbara Byrne and Fons van de Vijver (2010), the goal of translating scales in multilingual and cross-cultural comparative survey is to produce an instrument that “measures the same construct(s) in exactly the same way” across all language versions. We know of course …

“The challenge of translating scales in multilingual surveys and the value of leveraging “legacy materials””