The Development of a Research Programme to Translate and Test the Personal Well-being Questions in Sylheti and Urdu

Abstract

A pilot research programme was undertaken in order to translate and cognitively test the personal well-being questions developed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK into Urdu and Sylheti. These are both complex languages spoken by minority ethnic groups in the UK; monolingual speakers of these languages have been identified as being at risk of lower general health, and thus potentially of a lower well-being than the general UK population. The research programme involved two key stages in the production of these translations: translation workshops and cognitive testing of the translations. The translation workshops brought together experts in questionnaire development and personal well-being with native speakers of the languages from the community and bilingual interviewers in order to attempt to underpin the essence of the four personal well-being measures and arrive at the translation to be tested. The cognitive interviews that followed assessed these translations and the level of appropriateness of these measures with monolingual speakers in the UK. This article discusses the merits of each stage of this research programme in arriving at the best and most suitable translation for the personal well-being questions in Sylheti and Urdu.