This post is based on Episode 39 of Beyond Borders, the podcast for mental health professionals doing immigration evaluation work. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube for a deeper walkthrough of each evaluation type, including a fictional case study that traces how the same client might move through a hardship waiver, cancellation of removal, VAWA, a U-visa, and asylum.
You can use a test that was never normed for the client in front of you, say so in the report, and still have the adjudicator take your opinion seriously.
That's where I land, and it's the answer I give every time a clinician asks what to do when the person sitting across from them can't be validly tested in English. A presentation at the American Forensic Psychology Association conference sent me back to this question, so let's work through it.
Can I Use an English Test With a Non-English-Speaking Client?
Not without thinking hard about what you're getting, and not without saying so.
I see clinicians fall into one of two traps here. The first is deciding that without a validated test in the client's language, their hands are tied. I understand the caution, but it short-changes both your client and the adjudicator. Perfect testing conditions are rare (if they exist at all!), and if we only rendered opinions under ideal conditions, we'd rarely render opinions.
The second trap is running the English version anyway and reporting clean scores like nothing unusual happened. That's the appearance of rigor covering data you can't stand behind, and it's the report that falls apart the moment someone competent reads it closely.
The real work lives between the two. Use what you need, understand its limits, and say so clearly.
Is a Translated Psychological Test Still Valid?
Accuracy and equivalence are two different things, and a perfect translation gets you the first without the second.
Almost all of our instruments were developed and normed in English, in the United States, on what the cross-cultural literature calls WEIRD populations: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. That slice of humanity got quietly treated as universal, and it isn't.
Take a digit span task. In English, the digits one through nine take ten syllables to say. In Spanish, the same digits take sixteen. The Spanish version is literally harder to hold in mind, even with a flawless translation. Nobody did anything wrong, and the test still isn't equivalent.
Culture-bound items have the same problem. A symptom validity item about the number of states in the United States is built to be obviously false to anyone raised here. Give it to someone raised elsewhere, and it's no longer measuring what it was designed to measure. Not knowing the answer isn't feigning. It's not having grown up American.
What If the Validity Scale Comes Back Elevated?
This is where the stakes get real, and it's the question I get asked most.
Research on validity and feigning measures across linguistic and cultural lines has found elevated rates of false positives. Sit with what that means in an immigration case. It means telling an adjudicator that a truthful person appears to be faking, when the instrument is simply misfiring on a population it was never built for.
So, think it through before you write. If you've worked it out and concluded this isn't feigning, don't stage the whole debate on the page. At most, something like "although some scores fell outside the typical range, the results are consistent with X." Raising something only to take it back is the fastest way to confuse your reader.
Can I Translate a Psychological Test Myself?
No. Publishers forbid it, you need formal written permission, and an improvised translation isn't standardized, so its accuracy is unknown and drifts between administrations.
Go looking for an official published translation first. Many major inventories and trauma measures have one, and some are free. Think of your options as a continuum:
A test developed and normed in your client's home country, in their language
A test professionally adapted and renormed for that population
A professional translation without local norms
A qualified interpreter translating a simple instrument ahead of the session, like a symptom checklist
An ad hoc translation improvised during the session, which is the option to avoid
Get as far toward the top as your circumstances allow.
What If There's No Test in My Client's Language at All?
Then you don't use a standardized test, and you still have plenty.
Your clinical judgment is the one instrument that never goes out of norms. Tests inform your judgment. They were never meant to replace it.
A well-conducted clinical interview tells you a great deal. So do symptom checklists paired with careful discussion, direct observation, history, collateral records, and the account itself. A thoughtful interview through a skilled interpreter will often give you more trustworthy information than a translated test with norms that don't fit.
Don't let the toolbox dictate the opinion. The test serves the referral question, not the other way around.
How Much Should I Explain in the Report?
Less than you think, and this is where good clinicians undercut themselves.
Immigration work is different from criminal, civil, or family forensic work. We rarely testify. There's usually no opposing expert picking at your methodology line by line. What you have instead is an adjudicator who reads your report and either gives it weight or sets it aside, and who often isn't used to reading psychological test data.
So the risk you're managing isn't that someone exposes a weakness you missed. It's that your reader gets confused and discards good work because of how it was presented.
Burying the limitation is one way to get this wrong, and it isn't candid. Over-explaining is the other, and in our field it's the more common one. Flood an adjudicator with psychometric nuance and they'll either lose confidence in the whole report or latch onto the alarming words, “elevated,” “feigning,” “invalid,” and never absorb the qualifications you wrapped around them.
Do the hard thinking privately. Then disclose what's relevant plainly and state your conclusion cleanly. You're not hiding anything. You're just not staging an argument with yourself in front of a reader who'll only be confused by it.
And hold this firmly. Never let acknowledging a limitation in a tool turn into conceding that your opinion is unreliable. Your opinion doesn't rest on a single score. It rests on the whole picture.
Do I Have To Mention the Interpreter in My Report?
Yes, and handle it with the same confidence as any other limitation.
The moment you bring an interpreter into a mental health evaluation, you've introduced an extraneous variable. An interpreter may smooth out disorganized speech or tidy a rambling answer, and the very thing you were trying to observe gets cleaned up before it reaches you.
Use a qualified professional, ideally certified and experienced with psychological and forensic evaluations, and never a family member. Brief them beforehand on confidentiality and likely issues, and ask for verbatim first-person interpretation, because with responses to specific questions the exact wording is the point. Use simple sentences, skip idioms and multi-part questions, and speak directly to your client.
You used a qualified professional, you followed sound procedure, you accounted for it in your conclusions. Say that.
I walk through all of this in more depth on the latest episode of the Beyond Borders podcast, including the cases that shaped how I handle it.
🔊 Listen to the episode here:
If you're doing this work now, or building toward it, this is the thinking I'd want you to have before your next evaluation.
This episode is made possible by the Expert Training in Immigration Evaluations. If you want a clear, structured, and supported framework for doing this work ethically and competently, the next cohort opens soon.
