Multilingual Versions of Popular Social, Emotional, and Behavioral Tests

This paper focuses on bias in the translation of social, emotional, and behavioral tests. Specifically, the authors address tests developed in the United States (U. S.), but later adapted for use with non-English speakers, and / or individuals who live(d) outside of the United States. Ethics and best practices for use and selection of test translations are described, along with problems endemic to ad-hoc translation. In addition, the authors surveyed publishers to determine what languages and normative data have been made available other than the English version (with U.S. norms). This information is tabulated and presented. The most popular language available was English; normative data was available for English speakers from the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Spanish was the second most popular, with 12.59% of the tests translated into Spanish (8.3% with norms). These Spanish norms may be general (all Spanish speakers) or specific (e.g., Puerto Rican norms). In addition, country-based norms are described for some tests, but the actual language is not (e.g., there are norms for Spain but it is unclear if the language is Castilian, Basque, Catalan, Galician, or Occitan).