Translating original test materials into the target cultures' languages must maintain as much meaning and nuance as possible. It helps to have translators with second language experience in the origin countries of those languages. This will help them employ the most commonly used words and phrases to ensure wider understanding. After translations are complete, they needs to stand up to three levels of equivalency: functional--measures valid testing of the knowledge base, metric--measures corresponding difficulty levels and scalar--measures scoring correlations in both cultures.
Systematic test discrimination occurs when tests' contents cater to one culture as opposed to another. For example, questions about baseball may not be easily understood by natives of countries where the game is not played. One way to ensure that assessments are fair is by testing target cultures for predictive validity. This involves comparing the tests' abilities to predict successes in a particular endeavors--college admissions and workplace adaptability.
Individuals who come from cultures that do not have economic and educational resources to develop standardized tests, may not have experiences in group testing situations. Identifying and understanding test instructions should be an integral part of assessing test takers' understanding of the procedures. Deficiencies in written or oral comprehension can result in what is called "construct irrelevant variance," which means that test results will not accurately reflect the test takers' abilities
Choosing items to translate into target languages may affect the validity of the final scores. Texts with many technical terms are usually avoided because they carry implicit meanings in the original languages that are absent in target languages. Tests that contain a large number of idioms or slang words may not translate well into other languages. Sentence completion items are difficult to translate well enough to make natural sounding sentences, which means rewording sentences and changing placements of the answers.