Translation of the WHO quality of life scale: the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire

The goals of this article are to summarise the problems and solutions found in translating a very well-known health-related quality of life questionnaire from English into Spanish. From a functional approach, we have analysed and compared with the original the translation of the items of the World Health Organization Quality of Life assessment instrument, in its shortened version, the WHOQOL-BREF, which has followed a common international protocol based on back-translation techniques in which a review process by monolingual and bilingual groups takes place to ensure its equivalence. The article finds that the Spanish translated questionnaire still has a number of deficiencies that need correcting, so mainly linguistic but also sociocultural and visual questions have to be studied more carefully.