Found in translation: translation of clinical trial reports for inclusion in Cochrane Airways’ systematic reviews

Article type
Year
Authors
Stovold E1, Jackson E1, Kew K1, Normansell R1
1Cochrane Airways, St Georges, University of London, UK
Abstract
Background: One of the ways in which the Cochrane Airways editorial base is able to offer support to our review author teams is to provide help obtaining translations of trial reports which may be eligible for inclusion. We keep a list of contacts who provide volunteer translation services, for which they are acknowledged in the final review and on our website. We have maintained a 10-year log of author translation requests including the language of the report, translator details, and the target review.

Objectives:
1. Using data collected over a ten-year period:
a. analyse frequency of completed trial report translations by language;
b. track the subsequent inclusion of translated trial reports in Cochrane Airways Reviews.
2. Present the geographical spread of our translators.

Methods: This is a retrospective study of translation data recorded by Cochrane Airways over a 10-year period (January 2005 to December 2015). All translation requests were logged in a spreadsheet with the following information: review code; author and journal of the report; language of report; name of translator; date sent for translation; date received; and free-text comments. Translations are often sought from multiple translators to increase the chance of a positive response.
A copy of the spreadsheet will be used for this analysis. We will extract the following information: total number of requests listed; requests remaining after duplicates removed; number of requests put on hold/not fulfilled; the total number of translations obtained; and language frequency. We will then check the target reviews to ascertain if the translated trial report was documented, and whether the study was subsequently included or excluded.
We will extract the country of residence of our translators from our contact list to show geographical spread.

Results and Conclusions: We will present the range of languages of the trial reports we have been able to obtain translations for, and the impact these trial reports have had on our reviews over this 10-year period. We will display the geographical spread of our translators graphically.