What’s in a Name? Representation and Cultural Adaptation in Educational Assessments and Curricula

Details matter when promoting equity and inclusion in education. Here’s how translating and/or adapting names can help.

Kids who see people who look like them doing important work up on the big screen (or in the news) can more easily imagine themselves doing important things too. Think Captain Marvel, Black Panther, the Supreme Court justices...

Representation and diversity matter: not just in media, but in education as well. In the classroom, teacher diversity and a diversity of topics can lead to more engagement from a greater swathe of students (and often greater understanding of the richness of the world from all). But it all starts with a name.

Educational materials introduce students to a lot of fictional characters, and with these characters, there’s an opportunity too: to help students feel like they belong along with everyone else—equal, included and engaged.

Compare these points:

1. A test item originally written for the white middle-class experience might begin with, “Peter, Paul and Mary each have...”
2. Culturally adapted for Spanish speakers, that same item might read, “Pedro, Pablo and María each have...”
3. Adapting the original item for greater diversity, the new item might read, “Jennifer, Kumar and Pedro each have...”
4. Finally, adapting the original item for Spanish speakers as well as greater diversity, “Jennifer, Kumar and Pedro each have...” might work here as well.

Test developers and curriculum developers around the country increasingly recognize the need for more diverse and more inclusive educational materials. Their processes to achieve that may vary, but they may include content review, linguistic translation and/or cultural adaptation, and hiring diverse writers.

As part of our high-stakes foreign-language translation and adaptation work at Responsive Translation, it’s crucial for us to know who our client’s target audience is and what our client’s goals are. When it comes to names, some clients prefer to leave all fictional names as originally written, other clients prefer to culturally adapt all names and still other clients leave it in the hands of our linguistic, cultural and subject matter experts.

For example, for educational assessments, not only will we create a target-language style guide, but we will put each test item under a microscope during our TAR process. This is where our hand-picked team of linguistic, cultural and subject matter experts will determine if each item should be translated, adapted or rejected for unsuitability.

In the end, all kids want to be the hero of their own story. Let’s help them picture that more clearly.

Education for All

Responsive Translation is a leading provider of high-stakes educational services. For more information, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].