Translating Instruments Into Other Languages: Basic Considerations

As more people from nonYEnglish-speaking countries settle in the United States, they enter the healthcare system and present unique challenges for conducting nursing and healthcare research. Increasingly, researchers who formerly studied people who could read and write English now find themselves extending their work to people in the population pool who do not understand English. These researchers now must face the challenge of how to gather the same data from nonYEnglish-speaking study participants in a language other than the one in which the instrument(s) was developed and psychometrically evaluated. The purposes of this column are to provide a brief background on the technique of translating a research instrument into another language and to discuss some issues to consider when undertaking and/or evaluating a translated instrument.