LAUSR

The excellent paper by Stringer et al. (2020) in this issue of International Psychogeriatrics reminds me of the enigmatic pronouncement quoted above by the famous Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (Campbell, 2018). The context of this quote is that Borges is musing on an observation that the English translation of the gothic French novelVathek (1786) is superior to the original French because English language as a medium appeared to be better suited than 18th-century French to communicate the central message of that specific novel. A translation is a reincarnation that can be truer to the spirit of the original than the original itself (Campbell, 2018). It strikesme to be the case that in an analogousway, Stringer et al.’s cultural adaptation of Amsterdam Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Questionnaire (A-IADL-Q) (Sikkes et al., 2012) for use in the UK (A-IADL-Q-UK) is a reincarnation that, in some ways, is superior to the original! Through a process of multistep iterative modification, they do not simply adapt the instrument for use in another country; they substantially refine the language and content of the instrument for contemporary technologically advanced British life. Functional assessment is a vital task in cognitive assessment. It forms the boundary between mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and dementia, and therefore, tools such as the A-IADL-Q play a very important role. This study sets out to accomplish three objectives: