What is "Verification"?

What do we mean by ‘verification’? 

Before the material came to you for verification, it was handled by several different people, all of them professionals. They had many reference documents, guidelines, rules to observe; and they had to look at the translations from different perspectives. Due to the complexity of the assignment description, some errors may have slipped through the net or may have been introduced at some point.

The main purpose of your verification task is to ensure that the material from the various national versions is:

  • linguistically correct and error free;

  • appropriately and consistently adapted to the national context; 

  • equivalent in level of difficulty of the student assessment items (check that the target has not been made easier or harder compared to the source);

  • comparable and equivalent across countries. 

The 3 steps of the verification task are:

1. Correcting the material in the target translation; 


2. Confirming that the translation is fine with respect to the translation guideline


3. Assigning an intervention category and writing a comment.


Documenting your interventions in the material (steps 2 and 3) is the essence of your verification task and will be essential to be able to:

  • give countries a complete and detailed feedback on their translations, and the changes that were made;

  • ensure consistency in the implementation of the guidelines in all national versions; 

  • gather information for data analysis (dodgy items/statistics). 

Finding a good balance between under- and over-correcting 

  • Verification is more than proof-reading but should not be re-writing.

  • If it works fine in your language don’t change it for the sake of changing: avoid purely preferential changes.

  • Find a good balance between fluency and equivalence

  • Avoid over-correction and over-documentation.

Examples

  

Intervention Category: Adaptation Issue

Comment: "<language of test>" not adapted as "Mandarin". It is translated as "language of test". Corrected by VER.