Isn’t it time your organization got more mileage from existing assets? Translating and adapting your item bank will allow you to serve additional cultural and linguistic audiences—at a fraction of the cost of original test development.

Item banks are created to serve a particular purpose and a specific target audience. But you don’t need to limit your item bank to that audience. Instead, you can multiply the value of your item bank using translation and adaptation.

Translating and adapting an item bank allows test items to serve new linguistic and cultural audiences, such as Spanish-speaking students in the US or Alzheimer’s patients in Japan. However, the process is much faster and cheaper than original test development. And with the right translation and adaptation workflow, test items’ original psychometric properties are maintained.

The greatest asset a testing company or a testing program can have is its item bank. Item banks are used in certification exams, educational assessments, health measures, psychological assessments, employment tests and many other types of tests and assessments.

When created and maintained according to psychometric principles, item banks contribute to the reliability and validity of an assessment, and allow test takers’ knowledge and abilities to be more accurately measured. But what are item banks, really?

Item banks are repositories or databases that store all of the test items for a particular testing program, in addition to item-related information such as the item format, correct answer, item status, author, date the item was written, item response theory statistics, etc. They help make testing strategies such as adaptive testing and random item selection possible.

Using an item bank, test items and their metadata can be easily organized, sorted and tracked. There are many types of item banking software, both commercially-available and proprietary, to assist with this. The software can typically import and export files, which makes it easier for translation and adaptation. In fact, Responsive Translation hasn’t yet met a content management system or an item banking software that it can’t handle.

Good item banks are created with a lot of rigor and yes, a lot of love, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be repurposed to multiply their value. Translating and adapting your organization’s item bank will give you the power to serve additional cultural and linguistic audiences and enjoy a better return on investment for your organization.

Your Item Bank in Translation

Responsive Translation specializes in the translation, adaptation, validation and review of high-stakes assessments, including item banks, test directions and multimedia testing content, in more than 200 languages and dialects. Our company is certified for ISO 9001 and as a women’s business enterprise.

Responsive Translation works with most of the major test publishers in the United States today and we’d love to work with your organization too.

To learn more about our range of services and how we can help your organization, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].

Image credit: Suzy Hazelwood