2011م - 1444هـ
A Theoretical Framework for Back-Translation as a Quality

Assessment Tool



Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to offer an outline of a theoretical framework for describing a

translation quality assessment tool known as back-translation. Clearly, it would be too

ambitious – and hardly attainable – to develop a full-fledged framework within one article.

That is the main focus of my Ph.D. research (see Tyupa in progress). The objective here is,

rather, to acquaint readers with the possible application of cognitive linguistics to the

description, and hopefully improvement of, the back-translation procedure as applied in crosscultural social research. The article is organized as follows: Section 1 gives an overview of

the back-translation method and its application in cross-cultural social research settings;

Section 2 highlights the most relevant notions of cognitive linguistics and offers a tentative

definition of the theoretical framework based on its premises; Section 3 describes the corpus

that was used for the research and offers some examples from questionnaires translated in

actual research settings as an illustration; and the last section is devoted to conclusions