Minimally directed translations of survey instruments, even by experienced translators, risk being of poor quality, whether it is because translators are not informed about the intended meaning of survey items (and therefore have to bring their own interpretations of meaning), they do not take into consideration cultural and communicative norms, or they are not given guidance about an acceptable degree of adaptation. For any of these reasons, translations may misrepresent the intent of survey items or may sound unnatural or even offensive to survey respondents. Nonetheless, minimally directed survey translation work is still the norm, rather than the exception.

The experimental study described in this report aimed to assess the impact of different types of instructions given to translators for their translation of survey instruments from English into three target languages (Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, and Canadian French). The instructions were meant to guide translators toward a better understanding of what the survey items were intended to mean as well as how to make items sound more natural and culturally appropriate. Study findings indicate that while the provision of such instructions to translators had a significant impact on their translations, the direction of the impact (positive or negative) differed across the target languages, according to ratings of professional survey researchers who were also native speakers of those languages. The differences in ratings are attributed to the beliefs of the survey researchers and their level of commitment to two conflicting general types of equivalence in survey translation: equivalence of stimulus and equivalence of effect.