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Does anyone know of a good Spanish translation of the System Usability Scale (SUS) survey? Unfortunately I'm not a Spanish speaker myself however am testing with people who are. A solid resource of different language versions would be great if such a thing exists.

Also, more broadly; as I understand it the language for the SUS survey (english) is very well calibrated. What are the pros and cons of using a different language version? Is it scientifically valid to line up the German language answers against the English language answers?

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  • related: ux.stackexchange.com/questions/10181/…
    – Midas
    May 9, 2016 at 13:18
  • I translated it in French, results were globally "consistent" with the English meaning.
    – Brice
    May 9, 2016 at 13:26
  • Perhaps there are Portuguese versions out there as well that might give you some confidence that the Spanish translation should be fine? Automated translation tools are not generally good for these things, but perhaps something that has been around long enough like SUS can be done well enough by Google Translate.
    – Michael Lai ♦
    May 10, 2016 at 22:29

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This small study suggests that the quality of translation is important, especially for question 8:

https://uxpa.org/sites/default/files/finstad_sus_non_native_speakers.pdf

There is a crowdsourced German translation which has improved the German translation, which confirmed that it is reliable (and I believe SAP now use it):

https://minds.coremedia.com/2013/09/18/sus-scale-an-improved-german-translation-questionnaire/

Brooke did a follow up in 2013 where he mentions the unofficial translated versions:

http://uxpajournal.org/wp-content/uploads/pdf/JUS_Brooke_February_2013.pdf

He quotes the work of Finstad (2006) that reported non-English speakers had trouble understanding the word "cumbersome" but replacing it with the word "awkward" generally clarified this.

Google may help you find the Spanish version.

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  • thanks. Yes, google was the advice in a past question looking for a Portuguese/Spanish version (which only gave a Portuguese version in the answer). Sadly I'm having no look there, I think it requires googling in Spanish. Might have to delegate this work to the non-ux expert Spanish colleague I'm working with. Though a tried and testing confirmed valid version would be preferable of course.
    – the other one
    May 9, 2016 at 14:15
  • @theotherone why not try and track down the people involved in some of those studies that Splatz provided to see what they think?
    – Michael Lai ♦
    May 10, 2016 at 22:31
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There is a swedish version of SUS in the userpoll.io service based on a translation from a dissertation. If there are more language versions I would be happy to add them to the service as well.

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