A Theoretical Framework for Back-Translation as a Quality Assessment Tool Introduction The purpose of this paper is to offer an outline of a theoretical framework for describing a translation quality assessment tool known as back-translation. Clearly, it would be too ambitious – and hardly attainable – to develop a full-fledged framework within one article. That is the main focus of my Ph.D. research (see Tyupa in progress). The objective here is, rather, to acquaint readers with the possible application of cognitive linguistics to the description, and hopefully improvement of, the back-translation procedure as applied in crosscultural social research. The article is organized as follows: Section 1 gives an overview of the back-translation method and its application in cross-cultural social research settings; Section 2 highlights the most relevant notions of cognitive linguistics and offers a tentative definition of the theoretical framework based on its premises; Section 3 describes the corpus that was used for the research and offers some examples from questionnaires translated in actual research settings as an illustration; and the last section is devoted to conclusions