Introduction: Instruments of quality-of-life evaluation are widely used in research and clinical practice. The measures are created in a language and cultural environment that reflects the place it was developed. So, to use the same instrument, it is necessary to translate and adapt to the new location. These modifications must be systematized to maintain its accuracy. Therefore, some guides were made to standardize the correspondence and keep it reproducible despite the place it is used.
Objective: Describe the guides recommended internationally and add suggestions proposed by recent work.
Data Synthesis: The measurement tool should be translated to the foreigner language two times by different translators, synthesized and translated back to the native language two times by different persons. Then, a committee should analyze all the versions to develop a final version that must be tested to validate the equivalence in the applied situation. The standardized translation and adaptation of the measures aims to maintain the meaning, the equivalence and the concepts of the questions and answers. Adding some modifications, such as, smaller pre-test group and more detailed analysis; and one target group person to the committee, can accelerate the process.
Conclusion: Translating a validated questionary, despite the hard work, is still the best way to obtain an instrument of quality-of-life evaluation.
