During the past few years we have witnessed old-fashioned, paper-andpencil questionnaires becoming more and more obsolete in Russia. Instead, the investigators prefer to record patients’ answers via computerized programs and/or automated phone systems. It is obvious that this tendency is there to stay and this development poses new and exciting challenges to our linguistic-validation experts.
The use of the automated phone systems is of particular interest to us as translators because it requires us to venture into a new field of linguistics: that of the audio texts.
Oral and reading comprehension have different underlying mechanisms, which means that the sentences that are clear
on paper might become obscure when they are read out to the respondents, especially when it is done via an automated system and not by the interviewer.
This might happen either because of the organization of the entire text or because the information density of a particular sentence is too high for oral communication. The latter is especially relevant for English-to-Russian translations because Russian syntax is much more complex than English syntax.
For example, it is not sufficient to change statements into questions or incorporating stem questions into each item as we are sometimes instructed to do; we need to assess all aspects of each questionnaire to make sure the clarity is preserved. Is the newly adapted audio text so monotonous that the list of questions is hard to follow because what used to be a stem question (such as “how often because of your disease during the past two weeks”) is now repeated in each item? How to introduce the instructions that used to be in bold type on top of each page? Is the sentence too long and the
syntax too sophisticated to be presented orally? Is the choice of wording appropriate for oral communication?
These are just a few examples of the problems we need to deal with while switching to a new medium.

It is extremely important that all the parties involved - linguistic validation experts and developers - are aware of these issues and work together to reach the appropriate solutions.