The Translation and Translation Verification of the PIRLS Reading Questionnaires for Saudi Students

Abstract

When translating psychological measures from their original language to another language, after translation an assumption is made that the measurement assesses the same construct(s) in the original language and for those in the group of the translated language. If this assumption is not met, a translation problem occured and then the measurements are not comparable across cultures because they are not assessing the same variables. This study investigated the quality and accuracy of select variable translations of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) for Saudi Arabian students. This study only focused on the quality of translation of three reading affective constructs (reading motivation, reading attitude, and reading confidence). In their translation and verification procedures, the IEA used the Expert Translation Method (ETM, Mullis et al., 2009); they did not use a common method (given citations here) known as Backward Translation Method (BTM, from English to Arabic and then from Arabic to English) as a step of translation validity from English to the Arabic language. This investigation conducted the Backward Translation Method as a step of validation to evaluate whether the final Arabic PIRLS affective scales version were the same for those three constructs. After comparing between the IEA ETM translation version and the BM translation version, the researcher found that certain items were translated by the IEA ETM for Saudi students were above their level of reading understanding and thus comprehension while other items were not semantically equivalent. Results of this study advise researchers to proceed with caution as some attitudinal affective items are not comparable across the two cultures and not within the Saudi culture.