Objective Cross-cultural adaptation of the questionnaire: Nurses Work Functioning Questionnaire into Portuguese in the Brazilian context. This questionnaire was developed by Gartner et al. (2011) in order to detect early what are the nursing staff affected at work because they have TMC and identify the specific aspects of work that are harmed.

Method The adaptation process was conducted in accordance with internationally recommended methodologies, following the translation stages, synthesis, back translation, review by a committee of judges and pretest.

Results and discussion The questionnaire was initially translated into Portuguese resulting in two versions which were analysed and resulted in the synthesis of the translations. All produced versions were submitted to back translation and then carried to judges. This committee was composed of five experts who reviewed and compared all translations, developing a final version for application in the pre-test. At this stage it verified the content validity of all the items of the questionnaire by applying the concordance rate of 80% among participants. The pre-test was conducted with 35 nursing workers, including technicians and nurses from the Cardiac Surgery Unit of Hospital São Paulo. To check the reliability of the instrument was used Cronbach’s alpha, which averaged 0.88 indicating high internal consistency index.

Conclusions The results indicated that the adaptation process was conducted successfully and the adapted version of the questionnaire has demonstrated adequate psychometric properties, making it reliable to be used with the Brazilian culture.