Translating best practice into real practice: Methods, results and lessons from a project to translate an English sexual health survey into four Asian languages.

Survey translation is time-consuming and costly and, as a result, deviations from TRAPD 'best practice' occurred. It is not possible to determine whether closer adherence to TRAPD 'best practice' would have improved the quality of the resulting translations. However, our study does demonstrate that even adaptations of the TRAPD method can identify issues that may not have been apparent had non-team-based or single-round translation approaches been adopted. Given the dearth of clear empirical evidence about the most accurate and feasible method of undertaking translations, we encourage future researchers to follow our example of making translation data publicly available to enhance transparency and enable critical appraisal.