Tag Archives: translation

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”

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?”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Apor Sajgő, Andrea Ferrari and Steve Dept had already been working together on PISA 2000 for almost two years when they founded cApStAn. And yes, for those who wondered, initials of our respective given names form the cApStAn name. The company of Apor, Steve and Andrea. A capstan is also …

“2000-2020: the secret sauce in cApStAn’s sustainable growth”

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””

by Roberta Lizzi – Senior project manager, external human resources director @cApStAn In the framework of an international assessment study, PISA, some years ago I was asked to verify the Italian version of the Home Questionnaire, aimed at collecting background information about the parents of the tested students. One of the questions asked which language(s) …

“What makes a language a language?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A Florida county is reminding people to maintain a distance of at least one alligator between each other, and a jounalist for CNN suggests imagining the safety distance as the length of two golden retrievers, the width of an average sedan, a sofa, a dining …

“In the current health crisis accurately describing what we are asking of people is crucial: why the term “social distancing” should be changed”

by Steve Dept, cApStAn CEO Beyond the AI hype and controversial reports about automatic translation achieving parity with human translation, neural machine translation (NMT) has undoubtedly made spectacular progress in the last three years. Should professional translators resist or should they use it? Machine translation software has been around for a long time. In the …

“Should professional translators shun machine translation?”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village The non profit public service Gilani Gallopedia has taken on itself the mammoth task of pooling all the current global polling efforts on COVID-19, in a commendable effort to support the WAPOR network. It has searched over 200 national and 19 multinational polls for the …

“Over 200 national and multilingual polls, in six continents, are measuring people’s feelings and opinions about the coronavirus pandemic”

Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village A recent article in Slator looks at the role the language service industry plays in the drug approval process, a very relevant issue at a time when 300+ clinical trials involving Covid-19 or coronavirus are being conducted around the world in the quest to find a vaccine. …

“Linguistic quality assurance in the translation of high stakes content related to the coronavirus pandemic”

by Pisana Ferrari – cApStAn Ambassador to the Global Village Interesting review of the recently published book “The Testing charade” by Daniel Koretz PhD, Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Regular testing benefits the learning process, he says, in this sense it is “a means to give formative assessment”. But it …

“When stakes in testing get too high a lot can go wrong”