An update on cross-cultural adaptation of US English SMILEY

We previously developed a health-related quality of life (HRQOL) tool for children with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) that is valid in English for the United States, called Simple Measure of Impact of Lupus Erythematosus in Youngsters (SMILEY). In order to determine the effect of SLE on the well-being of children, adolescents and their parents and examine the response to treatment modalities, it is critical to have an HRQOL tool that is applicable for different cultures. After validation in US English, we reported the translation and cultural adaptation process undertaken by our team to make SMILEY available in the following 13 accepted modern language variants: Danish, Dutch, French (France), German (Germany), Hebrew, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Slovene, Spanish (USA and Puerto Rico), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Argentina), Spanish (Mexico) and Turkish. In this report we will describe the translation and adaptation of SMILEY into Afrikaans, Xhosa, Arabic (Saudi Arabia), Arabic (Egypt), Chinese, Czech, English (UK), German (Austria), German (Switzerland), Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Romanian, Serbian and Spanish for Venezuela. We followed the earlier reported procedure in this study consisting of: establishing collaborative relationships with different physicians caring for children with rheumatic diseases; forward and back translation of SMILEY and revisions; and cultural adaptation of SMILEY content.