Sponsor Impact report factored into survey planning and design to minimise when youre buying translation the question is not the risk of confusing participants. Imagine a 1-10 Will my translation be perfect? The question is, Is sliding scale. In a right-to-left language, it should the way that it is being managed something I can rely be designed so that one is on the right and 10 on on and trust? the left the reverse of what we are used to (although experiments have been done on The participant alienation problem flipping the scale for left to right readers to see if Its understandably easy to offend, confuse or bore that boosts engagement). people through bad translation or a poor Unsurprisingly, what are known as choice of words. However, participant rare languages present bigger alienation is an even greater worry when challenges than widely spoken ones. conducting an important piece of Our job is to translate Papiamento, Creole languages of the our clients objectives and research into, lets say, a rare disease or Dutch Caribbean that, combined, have needs into questions that condition among minority groups. In fewer than 350,000 native speakers, fall are easily understandable such instances, the participant pool from into this category. Delivering on briefs which you can draw may be small to by their audience encompassing rare languages requires a begin with. Speaking to them robust quality management framework, inappropriately almost inevitably means according to Partington hence, you wont get the engagement you need Empowers ISO certification. to carry out the research. The project will fail and, We do a lot of validation in the supply chain. We significantly and detrimentally, the voice of that need to assure ourselves that the external people we subgroup will not be heard. use are properly qualified, that they are who they The market research industry needs to think long say they are, and will be able to do what we need. and hard about participants and how to engage them For some languages, we dont have any capability when writing surveys. Priority is given to question internally to validate, so that means the process is numbers, length, opens and routing. In an ideal not only to find a translator, but also to find world, says Opiniums Endersby, all surveys would somebody else of equal quality to check the work that be given a final human check by a non-researcher, has been carried out by the initial translator. I think with no category knowledge or skin in the project, who would answer questions such as: Do you understand what it is that we are asking? Clients are understandably passionate about their brand, their sector and their objectives, and often assume the same of respondents. Whats more, the majority of people they communicate with on a day-to-day basis will be similarly engaged. At best, this can lead to ambiguous shorthand and, at worst, incomprehensible and mind-numbing jargon. Endersby defines the mark of a good researcher as the ability to combine a strong understanding of formal logic with genuine empathy two very different skills. The goal is to be the voice of consumers, not only by reporting their views, but by understanding how to engage them with research in the first place. Our job is to translate our clients objectives and needs into questions that are easily understandable by their audience, says Endersby. This can often be a tricky balance, and when we are talking to participants about particularly technical things, we introduce a phase into our research where we cognitively test our questionnaires with a small number of the target audience before we launch fieldwork. This helps us sense-check questions, language and flow with people who are not research savvy and, potentially, not familiar with the clients internal language. 26 Impact ISSUE 37 2022_pp20-29_Report.indd 26 30/03/2022 12:29