Cultural Mismatches in Translation of Key Sociodemographic Questions

U.S. survey organizations often create non-English versions of survey questions for limited English proficient (LEP) populations. This typically involves translating English questions, while attempting to maintain the meaning and measurement properties of the original items. However, even using best practices for survey translation, complications can arise because target language respondents will not necessarily share the historical or cultural context of English-speaking respondents. This paper discusses how conveying the same meaning to people from different cultures, who speak different languages, is always a challenge but it is especially difficult if we aim to lock in one set of concepts and then map others onto them. We discuss difficulties in translation of basic sociodemographic variables and ultimately, we recommend that even for this type of variable, researchers should start earlier in the design process and aim to ask questions in a way that is linguistically and culturally appropriate across languages while remaining comparable, rather than choosing a measure and trying to duplicate it through translation.