If your organization’s exam is currently only offered in English, then it’s time to reconsider. Who does your test serve? And who should it be serving?
Exams are important instruments that measure test takers’ knowledge and skills, but they only work when you give test takers a real opportunity to demonstrate what they know. For many people, however, that doesn’t necessarily mean sitting for an exam in English.
Consider these three reasons why translating and adapting your exam into Spanish is necessary.
Many potential test takers are rightfully reluctant to take a test that is given in a language that is not their native language. After all, that usually puts them at an automatic disadvantage. Translating your exam into Spanish, however, will allow your testing instrument to reach a much wider target audience.
Spanish speakers are a significant demographic both in the United States and abroad: 489 million people in the world are native Spanish speakers. The only language that has a greater number of native speakers is Mandarin Chinese.
A little closer to home, Spanish is spoken by 50 million people in the United States and it is the most commonly spoken language other than English. In fact, 13% of all US residents speak Spanish at home.
Translating your exam into Spanish will open it up to new audiences both within the United States and internationally, leading to expanded opportunities for your organization.
Any valid exam will measure what it sets out to measure: no more, no less. It’s only fair. For example, a math exam should evaluate test takers' math skills, and not their dance skills or their language skills.
By translating and adapting your exam into Spanish, you will allow many more test takers a better opportunity to demonstrate what they know, regardless of their English-language skills or cultural background. And that’s particularly important when you need to evaluate the knowledge and skills of a large or heterogeneous population.
Providing a Spanish-language exam can go a long way towards ensuring full and fair participation for more test takers, and in turn achieving greater test integrity.
New exams can be expensive to develop, but there’s no need to reinvent the wheel if you already possess an English-language exam. Translating and adapting an existing exam into Spanish, taking care to preserve psychometric properties, allows you to create a new exam for a new linguistic and cultural audience at just a fraction of the cost. In turn, offering a Spanish-language exam can mean more test takers. And more test takers means additional revenue.
Isn’t it time to look closer at translating your organization’s exam?
Responsive Translation is an experienced provider of high-stakes translation, adaptation, validation and review services for exams and assessments for education, human resources, clinical research and other high-compliance areas. For more information, please get in touch at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].