PEDSTest.com complies with the International Test Commission Guidelines for Translating and Adapting Tests
How PEDS Tools are translated
PEDS Tools enjoy complete cultural translations. Translators are usually bilingual health care providers who are required to create and then try out a new translation with families and staff. For widely spoken languages for which there are many dialects, translation teams are formed. For example, Spanish is the most widely understood language in the world but there are many different types of Spanish. So, Argentinians, Mexicans, Chileans, Spaniards, Guatemalans and American-Spanish speakers are included in the translation teams--with the goal of creating, where ever possible, a single translation that works well for all. With some languages, a unified translation is not possible (e.g., Portuguese and Cape Verdean, or French-Canadian versus French and Haitian). In these cases, unique translations are vetted for each speaker group.
Spanish Response Form for use with Spanish-Speaking Parents
For a complete listing of all resources in Spanish, please CLICK HERE
PEDS is also published in Spanish. The materials include a Spanish response form for parents. The PEDS Brief Guide to Scoring and Administration, while written largely in Engish includes prompts in Spanish such as how to ask parents whether they can complete the PEDS questions on their own or would prefer someone to go through it with them. The question in Spanish is also spelled out phonetically to assist non-Spanish-speaking service providers. When interpreters are not available to help with an interview administration, the guide provides both a Spanish translation and a phonetic version of the statement, "Please take this form home and find someone to help you complete it. Then, please return it in this envelope." When parents can complete the form in Spanish, the typical responses of Spanish speaking parents are listed in Spanish, along side English categories for parental concerns. This enables professionals who do not speak Spanish to easily score and interpret the Spanish version of PEDS.
PEDS Research for Spanish Speaking Professionals (.PDF file)
We also license a complete Spanish translation of the PEDS Brief Guide, Response, Score and Interpretation Forms. Please contact us if you are interested in using these.
Vietnamese Response Form for use with Vietnamese-Speaking Parents
PEDS is also published in Vietnamese and
is suitable for bilingual professionals.
PEDS Translations In Other Languages
The PEDS response form can be licensed in other languages. We can also work with you on other translations as needed. We currently have printed translations in English, Spanish, Vietnamese - and license these: Portuguese, German, Thai, Indonesian, French, Swahili, Arabic, Somali, Taiwanese, Chinese, Hmung, Malaysian, Russian, Haitian-Creole, Galician, Icelandic, Filipino Tagalog, Hebrew, Visayan, and Laotian, and Farsi coming soon. For licensing PEDS translations please contact us with your needs.
PEDS Tools Translation Guidelines
To ensure a quality translation, you must adhere to the following:
1. The translator should have a background in child development and/or in interviewing parents. Experience communicating orally with parents of limited education is preferable.
2. Use the simplest and briefest possible language.
3. Avoid slang because it may not be understood by all speakers of a language.
4. Avoid terms that may be troubling or inflammatory. For example, in pilot studies of PEDS, the word “worries” was less effective than “concerns” because “worries” is more ominous. Sometimes word choices have a dampening effect on communication due to connotations not initially recognized. For example, in our first attempt at a Somali translation in America, the translator, who was a long-time ex-patriot, did not realize that the word “concerns” was a current political term used by warlords. Families did not respond much (e.g., only 2% of Somali families raised concerns as compared to 63% of native-born Americans) and so the questions had to be reworded and the phrase when back-translated from Somali, “do you have feelings about your child’s …..” worked much better.
5. If sophisticated vocabulary cannot be avoided, be sure to pair it with terms that are readily understood (e.g., the phrase “learning and developing” helps parents understand the word “developing”). Other questions within the Work, i.e., PEDS:DM, probe developmental domains as understood by professionals but in ways that parents also understand. For example, “expressive language,” is a phrase not understood by most parents. For this reason, simpler terms, “talking and making speech sounds” should be used to invoke the constructs of expressive language while ensuring that the meaning is understood by all.
6. If you are unsure of the meaning behind any of the PEDS’ questions, please contact us.
7. We ask that you “back-translate” your translation into English as a first step, but that you also work with 2 – 3 other professionals to review your work. These professionals need to be fluent in English and the language you wish to use. These professionals need to have a background in child development, pediatrics, early childhood education, or social work. After these professionals have edited, we ask that you share your translation with at least 20 parents from various educational and related-language backgrounds to make sure the questions are thoroughly understood by all. For example, when we translated PEDS into Spanish, we obtained speakers from various Spanish-speaking countries (e.g., Mexico, several Central and South American countries, Cuban, Puerto Rico, and Spain, etc.) to make sure that all groups could use the same translation. In Taiwan, the first attempt at translations was understood poorly by parents with limited education and additional work on simplifying the language was needed. Similarly, we found difficulties with our first efforts at a Chinese translation where the word “concerns” was interpreted to mean, “Do you think about your child?” Obviously most parents do think about their children (!) and so the response rates for the high risk PEDS paths were excessive.
A second consideration when translating is that some languages (e.g., Arabic) have a spoken language that differs from the written one. Thus you may need to develop an oral translation as well as a written one.
We request that you send us contact names of professionals with whom you vet translations. When signing a translator's contract with us, you agree to apprise all professionals who assist in your translation or who view the Work in English and other languages, that test questions with the Work are copyrighted and MAY NOT BE USED WITHOUT PERMISSIONS.
If you have difficulty finding bilingual speakers with an appropriate language background to vet your translation, please contact us. We may be able to help by posting requests on professional discussion lists, but cannot guarantee success in finding contacts. Thus we urge you to find colleagues wherever possible.
8. While PEDS and the PEDS:DM generate similar results in developed nations (e.g., the US, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia), this may not be the case in other countries. Cultural differences and current events may well affect parents’ responses. For example, frequencies of concerns about children’s behavior are typically lower in the Middle East due to greater tolerance for “children being children”. PEDS administered during a malarial outbreak in Tanzania resulted in an enormously high rate of high risk responses, understandably.
If you seek to ensure that PEDS System items are effective in nations outside of North America or to establish frequencies of responses to various questions, you will need to administer the items to a random sample (e.g., primary health care, childcare programs) of at least 200 parents whose children are stratified equally by age (between 0 – 8 years of age) and by educational levels. This will enable you to compare the frequency with which children fall onto the various PEDS paths and/or pass or fail rates on PEDS:DM. We can send you information about the response rates in countries where we have normed our measures. Please contact us for such data and visit our website for recent studies: www.pedstest.com.
We advise you to also administer a lengthier measure alongside PEDS/PEDS:DM (Screening version) for which the PEDS:DM Assessment Level is appropriate (and/or Developmental Profile-III, Child Development Inventory in its 300 item version. The Denver, in contrast, lacks validation and is highly inaccurate). This process enables both standardization and validation—ideal for proof of accuracy in settings other than North America.
The ensuing data from a simultaneous standardization and validation study may suggest that alternative scoring is needed (e.g., in India and Malaysia, the self-help concern was associated with developmental problems and in Australia, the self-help concern was found to be an important long-term predictor of problematic outcomes). We are happy to work with you on research projects regarding translations. Please contact us for research guidance. See also www.pedstest.com for current research findings and suggestions for projects.