Abstract
This chapter defines and exemplifies cultural comprehensibility in relation to the translation of mental health scales. Cultural beliefs and values shape individuals’ understanding of health, interpretation of the changes of health status, and perception of the acceptability of health interventions. Therefore, language barriers and cultural beliefs impacts people’s ability to understand and respond to these tools, limiting the meaningfulness of data collected. It is imperative to enhance the cultural comprehensibility of translated and adapted mental health scales.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF
Keywords
Cultural beliefs and values shape individuals’ understanding of health, interpretation of the changes of health status, and perception of the acceptability of health interventions (Givens et al., 2007; Killoran & Moyer, 2006). For instance, health measures are developed based on specific beliefs and values that represent those prevalent in the scientific community and the dominant culture. Therefore, language barriers and cultural beliefs impacts people’s ability to understand and respond to these tools (Warnecke et al., 1997), limiting the meaningfulness of data collected. It is imperative to enhance the cultural comprehensibility of translated and adapted mental health scales.
Cultural comprehensibility is closely associated with semantic equivalence. When displaying semantic equivalence, an instrument item is comprehensible (van Ommeren et al., 1999). An incomprehensible translation, on the contrary, lacks semantic equivalence (Flaherty et al., 1988). Assessing comprehensibility entails determining the extent to which the content of the items on the translated and adapted scale can be clearly understood by target-language readers (Sidani et al., 2010). Therefore, we must pay close attention to well-considered planning before translation and to meticulous operation during translation. Before translation, we need to clarify the definition and indicators of the concept captured by selected instrument items to gain a better understanding of the meaning involved, while sharing target-language words or expressions that best capture the content and response options of these items (Sidani et al., 2010). During translation, we need to attach great importance to rendering the meaning of the items rather than to translating the items word for word, and to choosing simple, clear wording that can be easily understood by a target audience with lower educational attainment (i.e., Year 6) (Banville et al., 2000; Eremenco et al., 2005).
Because of cultural disparities, particular concepts that are obvious to one cultural community might be entirely incomprehensible and obscure to another. To facilitate comprehensibility, some researchers, like Brislin et al. (1973) and McGorry (2000), advocated “decentering,” a strategy of rewording the source-language items in the simpler terms and sentence structures or examples to promote comprehension, which is referenced by much of the literature on translation currently cited in the domain of mental health (Brislin, 1980; Carlson, 1997; Cha et al., 2007). Rather than regarding the source text as static and unchangeable, decentering entails considering the source and target texts equal in importance and allows for modifications of the source text during translation to ensure equivalence between these two texts (Black, 2018). Take the translation and adaptation of “become romantically involved with someone” in the item “I would be less likely to become romantically involved with someone if I knew they were mentally ill” on the Prejudice towards People with Mental Scale (Kenny et al., 2018). We translated “become romantically involved with someone” into an easily understandable Chinese expression “谈恋爱” to help our target readers understand the translated item and thus the intended semantic meaning of the original item. In the same vein, “a close relationship” and “on an emotional roller coaster” in the item “A close relationship with someone with a mental illness would be like living on an emotional roller coaster” on Day’s Mental Illness Stigma Scale (Day et al., 2007) were translated and adapted into the Chinese expressions of “谈恋爱” and “情绪可能会不太稳定, 会经历情绪上的大起大落” respectively to enhance cultural comprehensibility. Based on our expert panel discussion, we reworded the Chinese literal translations of “a close relationship” that is obvious to readers of the source (English) language but entirely obscure to readers of the target (Chinese) language, and of the metaphorical expression of “on an emotional roller coaster” that is likely to be misleading or puzzling among the intended Chinese populations. The reworded Chinese versions of “谈恋爱” and “情绪可能会不太稳定, 会经历情绪上的大起大落” are the most appropriate translated versions, not only retaining the original meaning of the concept in the source instrument (Leplege & Verdier, 1995), but also using idiomatic cultural expressions of the target language that are expressed in simple, easily-comprehensible wording (Sidani et al., 2010). In this way, semantic equivalence is established between the source and target items, ensuring the cultural comprehensibility of the adapted item among Chinese populations.
References
Banville, D., Desrosiers, P., & Genet-Volet, Y. (2000). Translating questionnaires and inventories using a cross-cultural translation technique. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 19, 374–387.
Black, A. K. (2018). Language translation for mental health materials: A comparison of current back-translation and skopostheorie-based methods. All Theses and Dissertations.
Brislin, R. W., Lonner, W. J., & Thorndike, R. M. (1973). Questionnaire wording and translation. In Cross-cultural research methods (pp. 32–58). Wiley.
Brislin, R. W. (1980). Cross-cultural research methods. In I. Altman, & A. Rapoport (Eds.), Environment and culture. Springer.
Carlson, E. D. (1997). A case study in translation methodology using the health-promotion lifestyle profile II. Public Health Nursing, 17(1), 61–70.
Cha, E. S., Kim, K. H., & Erlen, J. A. (2007). Translation of scales in cross-cultural research: Issues and techniques. Journal of Advanced Nursing, 58(4), 386–395.
Day, E. N., Edgren, K., & Eshleman, A. (2007). Measuring stigma toward mental illness: Development and application of the mental illness stigma scale. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 37(10), 2191–2219.
Eremenco, S. L., Cella, D., & Arnold, B. (2005). A comprehensive method for the translation and cross-cultural validation of health status questionnaires. Evaluation and the Health Professions, 28, 212–232.
Flaherty, J. A., Gaviria, F. M., Pathak, D., Mitchell, T., Wintrob, R., Richman, J. A., et al. (1988). Developing instruments for cross-cultural psychiatric research. Journal of Nervous Mental and Disorders, 176(5), 257–263.
Givens, J. L., Houston, T. K., Van Voorhees, B. W., Ford, D. E., & Cooper, L. A. (2007). Ethnicity and preferences for depression treatment. General Hospital Psychiatry, 29, 182–191.
Kenny, A., Bizumic, B., & Griffiths, K. M. (2018). The Prejudice towards People with Mental Illness (PPMI) scale: Structure and validity. BMC Psychiatry, 18, 293.
Killoran, M. C., & Moyer, A. (2006). Surgical treatment preferences in Chinese American women with early-stage breast cancer. Psycho-Oncology, 15, 969–984.
Leplege, A., & Verdier, A. (1995). The adaptation of health statusmeasures: Methodological aspects of the translation procedure. In S. Schumaker & R. Berzon (Eds.), The international assessment of health-related quality of life: Theory, translation, measurement and analysis (pp. 93–101). Rapid Communication.
McGorry, S. (2000). Measurement in a cross-cultural environment: Survey translation issues. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal, 3(2), 74–81.
Sidani, S., Guruge, S., Miranda, J., Ford-Gilboe, M., & Varcoe, C. (2010). Cultural adaptation and translation of measures: An integrated method. Research in Nursing and Health, 33, 133–143.
van Ommeren, M., Sharma, B., Thapa, S., Makaju, R., Prasain, D., et al. (1999). Preparing instruments for transcultural research: Use of the translation monitoring form with Nepali-speaking Bhutanese refugees. Transcultural Psychiatry, 36(3), 285–301.
Warnecke, R. B., Johnson, T. P., Chavez, N., Sudman, S., O’Rourke, D. P., Lacey, L., & Horm, J. (1997). Improving question wording in surveys of culturally diverse populations. Annals of Epidemiology, 7, 334–342.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this license to share adapted material derived from this chapter or parts of it.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Shan, Y., Ji, M. (2024). Cultural Comprehensibility of Mental Health Scales. In: Cultural Adaptation in Chinese Mental Health Translation. New Frontiers in Translation Studies(). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1727-9_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-97-1727-9_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-97-1726-2
Online ISBN: 978-981-97-1727-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)