Canadian Buyers Are Focused on Methodological Validation Aspects Over Language Services Only

The issue of reliability becomes quite relevant when purchasing agencies assess their vendors' capabilities. This problem seems to have an impact on how psychometric and linguistic validation services are being evaluated nowadays.

Previously, buyers often viewed translation as an auxiliary activity within larger projects. Timely delivery was seen as more important than other factors. It seems that procurement officers currently take into account such criteria as reliability and validity of measurements in addition to timeliness and cost-effectiveness.

Partly, this issue comes from the changes in how the results of assessments are utilized. Nowadays, the outputs are often used outside of an academic context and even outside the project itself. When making decisions, procurement teams tend to rely on outputs of the processes carried out by contractors. To ensure accurate outcomes, buyers carefully evaluate an instrument's reliability.

For this reason, the evaluation of validation providers is getting more detailed. Procurement processes currently involve discussions of testing methodology, mechanisms of receiving feedback from respondents, and proof of the measurement's validity, among others. Simply providing the buyer with a translated version is not considered enough anymore.

It happens in several industries. Medical facilities use surveys aimed at measuring patients' perception of care. They would like to make sure that survey results will be comparable for various populations. The same situation can happen in education. A school might want to understand whether two versions of test results are comparable. And, of course, employers would like to know whether the results received using different languages mean the same thing in relation to the target metric.

Documentation of the process has also become a part of procurement discussions recently. Stakeholders are interested in seeing how adaptations were done, which problems arose, etc. It does not serve merely as an indicator that the process took place; it gives assurance that the result can be relied upon in the future.

However, procurement officers still have certain constraints in mind. Validation services increase cost and extend the timeline, for instance. This is something that must be taken into account when selecting vendors.

In response, the validation service market changed gradually but consistently. Today, providers have to provide information about how their approach works in layman's terms. Technical knowledge is essential, of course, but it is often not enough during the procurement process alone.

Risk mitigation is also an important aspect of today's environment. Organizations spending their resources on assessment do not want any questions to appear later. Therefore, addressing these risks at the beginning of a project is seen as better than having to discuss them later.

With all of this in mind, psychometric and linguistic validation services are being evaluated based on their contribution to data quality, and not only on linguistic aspects alone. In Canada, buyers focus on methodological aspects more than before.