Translation of Questionnaire

During my last month work, I found that there were so many questionnaires to be translated in our company. I have translated several questionnaires including food questionnaire, two medication questionnaires, questionnaire about third party institute participation administration, etc. All of them were done in SDLX form. The followings are my conclusion during doing these tasks.

Firstly, it is necessary to pay much attention to the consistency of professional terms. There is a typical example in my translation task of medication questionnaire last week.

There is a drug named Warfarin which is a kind of prescription drug. In Chinese, people often call it “华法林抗凝剂”, and also sometimes call it “华法令抗凝剂”. This term appears so many times. And in these two Chinese names, there is only one different word. One is “Huafalin”, the other is “Huafaling”.

Therefore, it asks me to pay more attention to it. Certainly, as for checking term consistency, a method with Xbench has been introduced to us by our colleague Cici today. Xbench is a very useful tool. If you would like to know how to use it, please contact us by link CCJK, we have specialist who can tell you how to use it.

Secondly, sometimes it is necessary to be colloquial to translate questionnaire. However, sometimes it needs to be formal. How to say so? Please read my examples carefully.

If the interviewer of this questionnaire is common people, the general language sense should be colloquial, such as in food questionnaire. But, in medicine questionnaire, the professional terms should be formal. For example, medical term “stroke prevention”, is often spoken to be“中风预防”in spoken Chinese.

However, in this translation task, it should be“卒中预防” because this survey study‘s respondent is professional doctor. All terms should be professional.

Thirdly, the translation article should be loyal to original article. My colleague ever mentioned this point in a meeting. This is survey report, not literary article. It is not necessary to use too many advanced vocabularies, also not necessary to take too much literature color.

All of the above are my conclusion from recent questionnaire translation tasks. Maybe there will be more tasks of questionnaire translation to deal with in the future. I will continue concluding other related questions or significant translation skills.

Read Also: Trans – Purpose of Translation part I