Translating new terms into another language can be a challenge for specialists. The more complex the concept, the more difficult the process can be. Using the English term as a neologism may sometimes be a convenient solution, but some languages are not very open to accommodating foreign words.
Currently I'm struggling with a couple of terms in the area of health education and health promotion (i.e., health literacy, empowerment).
I would like to invite you to share your experience with translating medical terms from English into other languages. Do you follow a certain path or go through particular steps to make sure the outcome is of best quality? I hope your insights will be helpful.
I will recommend you to include translators who are native speakers of target language from both medical and non-medical fields. Ideally, during expert review meeting, all translators should be present to reach consensus of any uncertainties of translations. Next, please pre-test the terms with the potential users or readers. I hope this helps.
Involving translators in the expert review meeting is indeed a very important part of the process and also pre-testing. Thanks a lot!
I agreed with Wong. Also, back-to-back translation strategy should be engaged. How does this work? Engage two medical linguists or two independent groups of medical linguists. The two groups must understand both English and local languages. One of the groups, lets say group1 should translate the medical term(s) to the local language. Then the translated term(s) should be translated back to English language by group2 to ensure term consistency. Kindly note that if that experience/term has not been captured in the local language before, then the eventual term might be compound words, phrase etc. Thank you.
Brislin, R. W. (1970). Back-translation for cross-cultural research. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 1, 185-216.
This is a seminal work discussing methodology for cross-cultural translations of written word. Another avenue to explore is that of health literacy.
Hope this helps.
The aim of this process is to achieve different language versions of the English instrument that are conceptually equivalent in each of the target countries/cultures. That is, the instrument should be equally natural and acceptable and should practically perform in the same way. The focus is on cross-cultural and conceptual, rather than on linguistic/literal equivalence. A well-established method to achieve this goal is to use forward-translations and back-translations. This method has been refined in the course of several WHO studies to result in the following guidelines.
Implementation of this method includes the following steps:
Forward translation
Expert panel Back-translation
Pre-testing and cognitive interviewing
Final version
https://www.who.int/substance_abuse/research_tools/translation/en/
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