Abstract

Promotion of good practice guidelines is clearly a laudable pursuit for any aspect of scientific endeavor; not least in the area of patient-reported outcome (PRO) instrument adaptation, where extemporary approaches to translation are commonplace. Nevertheless, what Wild and colleagues have produced are not so much “principles of good practice” as a synthesis of the opinions of a number of organizations on how to translate PRO measures. Indeed, in several instances more than one opinion is expressed. No scientific evidence is provided to support these opinions and the suggested methodology falls short of including a meaningful test of the quality of the translations produced.