Patient reported outcomes (PRO) translation and linguistic validation between English and Czech

We perform translation, back-translation and linguistic validation of questionnaires for patient reported outcomes between English and Czech used to evaluate results of clinical studies

Translations of patient reported outcomes should be performed with high attention to attain high accuracy, since these questionnaires often form basis for evaluation of the clinical study. The procedure used to translate such documents should also ensure correct transfer of the content and of culture-specific features into the target language. Therefore, this translation includes also linguistic validation. The procedure outlined below applies to validated translation in direction from English to Czech, since this is the most frequent direction in our case. However, this procedure, if needed, can be applied also in the opposite direction, i.e. for translation and validation of PRO questionnaires from Czech to English. 

The translation and validation procedure can be outlined as follows:

1) Two translations of the original document (questionnaire) are made into Czech independently by two specialized translators.

2) A third specialized translator (editor) uses these two independent translations to create the first Czech translation (selects a better one of these two or combines best parts of these two and performs necessary corrections)

3) The first translation is translated back into the original language (English); in other words it is back-translated. This back-translation should be performed by an English native translator (whose mother language is English). The purpose of back-translation from Czech into English is to find any deviations or differences between the first Czech translation and the English original. Therefore, the back-translation from Czech into English should be a correct translation of the first Czech translation.

4) Back-translation into English is carefully compared to the English original document, and all deviations or differences between the original document and this back-translation are tracked.

5) Each difference found between the original English document and the back-translation is carefully evaluated wheather it should be corrected or not, since it might also arise during the process of back-translation, and the corresponding expression in the first Czech translation may be in fact a correct translation of the original. Otherwise, deviated expressions in the first translation should be corrected. The result of this step is another version of translation - the second Czech translation. 

6) Throughout the whole procedure and mainly during the step 5, it is necessary to track all  expressions which might convey their meaning in Czech in the way that is ambiguous or might not be understood in Czech properly. All these expressions are discussed with persons of similar health and age status to those who participate in the clinical study to get final expressions that convey the content and culture-specific features in the most suitable way. The result of this step is the final validated translation.