Patient Surveys: Diversity in Medical Translation

Most patient surveys are developed for a homogeneous Western target population and fail to take into consideration the diverse cultures, languages and geographies of the actual patient pool. Yet, such surveys remain one of the cornerstones for evaluating patient experience and for patient-provider communication. Some situations and activities in patient questionnaires are not relevant or equivalent across cultures (back pain caused by shoveling snow, walking several blocks, doing housework). In other cases, terms need to be adapted for specific locales (“saubermachen” in Germany, but “putzen” in Switzerland for “cleaning”). These linguistic and cultural gaps are reason for serious concern and translators must learn to use cross-cultural adaptation to guarantee both conceptual and semantic equivalence to ensure the reliability and validity of patient-reported outcomes.

We will examine common problems that arise during the translation, back-translation and validation steps and tackle “untranslatable” concepts, idiomatic expressions and metaphors and degrees of linguistic deficiency and abstraction.