Purpose: To improve the quality of translated informed consent forms by providing guidance on the preparation and use of a translation brief.  This guide illustrates how to develop a translation brief for the special case of the informed consent form.

Need: Translation quality can be improved by stepping back and considering how texts achieve their communicative purpose as well as any special assumptions or cultural practices that may be embedded in the content. Because health care texts take many forms with defined communicative purposes (e.g., disease-specific educational handouts or booklets, marketing or health benefits brochures, registration forms), requesters need to understand the implications of culturally-determined conventions and writing styles associated with different text types. That is the purpose of this tool: to explore the unique origins, purposes, and attributes of informed consent forms in order to help translation teams make the choices that will lead to translations that achieve their communicative purpose (rather than, e.g., word-for-word translations).
                                                                                                     
Sources: Toward this end, Tool #4 summarizes the background information in Tool #5: A Practical Guide to Informed Consent and the ideas explained in Tool #3 to create a translation brief for translation of informed consent forms.

Who Should Use This Guide: This guide is meant for requesters or individuals (or departments or organizations) responsible for initiating translations of informed consent forms. In some cases, it may be used by the original author(s) or the translator to initiate discussion with the person(s) requesting the translation.