The translation of the Italian metalinguistic ability tests TAM-2 and TAM-3 (Pinto, 1999) into the German MKT-2 (Jessner, Hofer, & Pinto 2015) and MKT-3 (Jessner, Pellegrini, Moroder, Hofer, & Pinto 2015)

This article describes the major issues and strategies that were elaborated for translating two metalinguistic tests, the TAM-2 (Pinto, Candilera, & Iliceto 2003) and the TAM-3 (Pinto, Iliceto, & 2007), from Italian into German, as MKT-2 (Jessner, Hofer, & Pinto 2015) and MKT-3 (Jessner, Pellegrini, Moroder, & Pinto 2015). The intrinsic complexity of tests that measure both the implicit and the explicit level of metalinguistic awareness was pointed out as one of the sources of difficulty. Terminological issues specific to German versus Italian and also versus the languages of previous translations of these tests (English, Spanish, French) were extensively analysed. The translators present some of the solutions devised for rephrasing the most problematic items in both the MKT-2 and in the MKT-3. The valid empirical results found in the pilot studies conducted with the MKT-2 and the MKT-3 on German-speaking participants are to be viewed as an indirect confirmation of the validity of the translations.