“Don’t fix bad translations”: A netnographic study of translators’ understandings of back translation in the medical domain

Abstract

Back translation (BT) means taking a translation and translating it back into the original language to check the accuracy of the translation. In the Health Sciences, BT is widely used and considered the gold standard for quality assurance. However, BT has received very limited attention within Translation Studies, and at the same time, there seems to be a lack of consensus in guidelines on BT within the medical field on the appropriate approach to BT. This begs the question of whether translators know what BT is and how they understand and approach BT. Using a netnographic approach, we explored translators’ utterances related to BT in two online translator forums. The analysis showed some confusion as to the appropriate approach to BT which underlines the importance of providing translators with a brief. This, however, requires that clients are aware of the purpose and limitations of BT.