Translation and Interpreting in 200+ Languages

Linguistic and Cultural Equivalence

Helping you get the high-quality assessment translations you need.

Translated and adapted assessments offer valuable insights into different linguistic and cultural audiences, but only if the psychometric properties of the original test or control language are maintained. That’s why all of Responsive Translation’s assessment services are designed to ensure linguistic and cultural equivalence, and greater testing integrity for your assessments.

Language

When translating and adapting assessments, accuracy is crucial. The target language should express the same message and meaning as it does in the source language. Yet, accuracy is not a straight line. Close translation, or even word-for-word translation, can be appropriate in some cases, but simply disastrous in others.

Equivalence is a careful balancing act that requires expert linguistic knowledge of the target and source languages. Each word unit, grammatical structure, individual paragraph and whole text must be correctly analyzed before starting to piece the translation puzzle together. And that’s what we live for.

Responsive Translation’s experienced teams of translators, editors and subject matter experts carefully attend to each layer in order to craft your masterpieces—accurate, cohesive and meaningful translations that are conceptually, semantically and pragmatically equivalent to the original.

Culture

Language and culture go hand in hand. For translated assessments to be fair assessments, they need to be culturally equivalent as well as linguistically equivalent.

Cultural equivalence guarantees that any cultural connotations are not gained or lost in translation. To make that happen, Responsive Translation’s expert linguists adapt and refine each item as necessary to allow respondents to understand what is being asked of them in the way that it was intended. Even in cases when an exact cultural equivalent may not exist.

Responsive Translation is committed to ensuring that your translated and adapted assessments are ready to measure what they were designed to measure: no more, no less.

Testing Without Barriers

Responsive Translation provides expert assessment translation, adaptation, validation and review for a wide variety of languages and cultural contexts, ensuring linguistic and cultural equivalence every step of the way.

From major world languages to less common languages, we have teams of highly-qualified linguists and test development experts who are ready to bring your assessments to new audiences. In addition, all of our services are available in regional variants like US Spanish, Canadian French and Simplified Chinese so that your assessments for specific linguistic populations are as effective as they can be.

To learn more about how Responsive Translation can help your organization, please get in touch at [email protected] or 1-800-872-6752 (+1-212-818-1102 outside the US).