The Feasibility of Test Translation between Unrelated Languages English to Navajo
Annabelle R. Rosenbluth · TESOL Quarterly · 1976
This study investigates whether a test can be translated into Navajo in a form suitable for assessing the language development of kindergarten, first, and second grade Navajo students. The norms from an English test administered in Albuquerque, as well as from the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts norm group, were used to provide comparison of difficulty and discrimination of the test. It is concluded that there are four crucial differences between the Navajo and English tests. 1. Different level of syntactic difficulty in a number of items, which could not be overcome by paraphrase; 2. Differences in the way English and Navajo languages organize experience into concept units; 3. Accidental similarity of concept words in Navajo that have no such similarity in English; 4. Different range of meaning in concept words in Navajo, leading to duplication of Navajo test words in items that are not similar in English. Though words for concepts such as those in the Boehm Test of Basic Concepts must exist in every language, the way they are incorporated into surface grammar for expression differs so widely between Navajo and English that the universality of this concept core probably cannot be tapped in a practical way by the translator or teacher.