Before we go ahead with questionnaire translation steps, you need to understand the fact that an effective questionnaire is always psychometric validated. It shows that items are reliable, consistent, and valid.
However, if it has been assumed that a questionnaire measures perception of website usability, the same should be helpful to differentiate between usable and unusable websites. There are websites and software meant for international clients as well where some users don't speak English or speak it as a second language.
Steps to translate the questionnaire into a different language than it was available in:
Translation Into The Target Language
For translating a questionnaire, you can have more than one expert to perform the job but it’s not mandatory for every project. Of course, Google’s translation is a faster tool available for translation but you cannot rely on it in case of professional translation needs. The right approach would be to hire experts for affordable questionnaire translation services in India.
Go For The Back Translate Option
To ensure how effective the translation was, you can approach another independent person to translate the translated questionnaire back into the original language. Just like the game of telephone, things get a little lost in translation. The best option would be to have two translators reconciling the differences.
Adjust Items Again
Expert translators can administer newly translated and refined items to a small sample among five to twenty people like you would do with the typical set of participants. But unlike typical administration, you can simply ask participants to comment on the items. Ask them to comment on words that are probably not translated correctly or seem to be unclear or any other word or phrase will do more justice. You can adjust items again accordingly.
In this process, you will get to find words or phrases which are not translated properly or are not meaningful. It has been observed that certain words don't work well in the original language to native speakers. Always use the word which works well and is better understood by the targeted group of people.
Validate Items
Translation of questionnaire is a tricky job so even after careful translation and back translation, there is no surety that the translated version will contain the same psychometric properties like it was originally. Just do one thing, you can administer a new questionnaire to larger sample size to validate the items. For example, you would want to go with five people per item and for the ten-item instrument, there will be a minimum total of fifty people to re validate the items.
Remember, it’s
It's not always possible to include this step when translating a questionnaire when using it for real-world applications. However, this is an essential step for a higher stakes questionnaire and one that will be used repeatedly.