Translation and Cross-cultural Adaptation of the Oral Health Literacy Assessment-Spanish to Brazilian Portuguese

Objective: To translate the Spanish version of the instrument to measure oral health literacy - Oral Health Literacy Assessment-Spanish (OHLA-S) - into Portuguese (Brazilian) and perform their cross-cultural adaptation. Material and Methods: OHLA-S evaluates the level of oral health literacy from questions measuring pronunciation and comprehension skills of 30 dental terms concerning the etiology, anatomy, prevention and treatment of oral conditions. A committee of experts was created to evaluate all the steps of the process, right from the original version, through to the final one. The steps were: initial translation into Portuguese language by two Spanish teachers, back-translation into Spanish by two native Spanish speaking, review by the committee, and pre-test. For the pre-test of cross-cultural adaptation, the alternative "did not understand" was added to each item of the tool. The instrument was applied to a sample of 20 adults. Results: In the initial translation, some differences were observed between the translated versions, and after the committee had reviewed these versions, a few words were replaced by other synonyms to enable better understanding of the instrument by the population. When the back-translation was compared with the original version, the results were very satisfactory and there was no need to make any further change or replacement. In the pre-test, the version of the tool Oral Health Literacy Assessment-Brazilian (OHLA-B) was very well understood by the studied population and there was no need for other cultural adaptations. Conclusion: OHLA-B proved to be easily understood by Brazilian adults and could be an important tool for measuring levels of oral health literacy.