Introduction 3
Chapter 1 The concept of equivalence 6
1.1 Translation equivalences: definition, types and ways to reach it 6
1.2 Psychological Equivalence in psychological and psychotherapy discourse 8
1.3 Definition and characteristics of psychological and psychotherapy discourse 10
1.3.1 Metacognition 12
1.3.2 Reflexivity and reflexive questions in psychology and psychotherapy discourse.. .12
1.3.3 Research and therapy tools in psychology and psychotherapy discourse 14
1.4 Translation of psychological tests and questionnaires 16
1.4.1 Psychological tests: definition and type 17
1.4.2 Assessment of translation adaptations of psychological tests 17
Chapter 2 Linguistic and psychological equivalency tread off in the translation of psychometric tests and psychotherapy questions 20
2.1 Linguistic properties of the psychotherapy questions 22
2.2 Linguistic and semantic properties of the psychological questionnaire 3 3
2.3 Translation analysis guidelines 37
2.4 Results and analysis 40
Conclusion 55
Discussion 64
References 66
Appendix (1, 2, 3) 70
The general goal of this work is to research the essential aspects of translation equivalency highlighted in professional discourses namely psychological discourse and interconnectedness of translation and psychological equivalency within this discourse looking at the translation of psychometric tests and psychotherapy questions as case studies.
Topicality
While language has always been one of the fundamental parts of education, the history of translation study did not start until the 20th century, which had a heavy emphasis on ‘equivalency’-a degree of ‘sameness’ between the source language(SL) and the target language(TL). (Despoina Panou, 2013) Even though some of the equivalencies do take into account the cultural part as Mona Baker coined the term ‘pragmatic equivalence’ that focuses on what is implied in SL, most of the equivalencies are still oriented in the linguistic aspect.
However as intercultural communication progresses, we now have more chances to have direct contact with other cultures. We are exposed to more and more products of other cultures and languages in every professional domain, among which one of the areas that has been heavily dominated by the English language would be psychology and the instruments it uses for diagnostic and treatment purposes, where psychometric tests and psychotherapy questions are widely used as baselines all over the world psychological practices and research studies. With the advance of awareness in psychological well-being, people around the world are becoming increasingly in need of those testing tools. But not everyone can speak English, thus the need for translated tests arises. In order to make the testing tools more effective towards different cultural groups, translators of different languages have to take into account psychological equivalency for it is an important criterion for achieving more localized and accurate results.
Variability
Some researchers in the field of translation like Anthony Pym(2007), had already expanded the concept of equivalencies, making not only focus on the linguistic aspect. In his work, he proposed two terms: 1. ‘Natural Equivalency’, those equivalencies we have on a structural linguistic level before the act of translation. (eg: ‘Moon’ in English can find its counterpart ‘Luna’ in Spanish.) 2. ‘Directional Equivalency’, which emphasizes the mismatch of numbers of potential (translated) items when the direction of translation changes. (eg: the English word ‘Joker’ in poker can be translated into ‘HW’ in Chinese; but when the word ‘HW’ is translated back to English, it can be either ‘wild card’, ‘trump card’ or ‘Joker’)
Current situation
However, most of the concepts of psychological equivalencies were created by psychology practitioners, out of the need for catering psychological tests to a more diverse group of people coming from different cultural backgrounds who do not speak the language of the tests.
What can be done now is to collaborate translators with psychologists, so as to expand the scope of translation theory regarding equivalency, making it include the psychological aspects, which not only resides in the target language culture, but also the psychological function of the target group and the translators.
Hypothesis
Researchers like Allan B. I. Bernardo(2011) had found that there is a mismatch in linguistic equivalency and psychological equivalency when translating psychological tests that mostly were created in English to other languages. Which leads to the inaccuracy in the data gathered by the test.
We believe that most of the mistakes in translation were tied to the inappropriate employment of psychological equivalency, let it be failing to take it into consideration while translating, or focusing too much on it that creates linguistic mistakes. What needs to be done is to find a balance between the two equivalencies and take both of them into account when translating. So that one can perform better in the future.
Our hypothesis is that the mistakes in both translation and back-translation are largely caused by the negligence of psychological equivalency which indicates the pre-established rules/preference translators had in their language system and cognition.
Research object - linguistic and psychological equivalency. Research subject - the influence of linguistic and psychological equivalency on translation accuracy.
Research objectives are: to compile a database for psychometric tests and psychometric questions; to specify linguistic features of psychometric tests and psychometric questions; to reveal common and distinctive features of linguistic and psychological equivalency; to reveal the nature of translation mistakes in translation psychometric tests and psychometric questions.
The methodology employed in this research mainly includes: discourse analysis, questionnaire, corpus tagging and back-translation analysis.
Material
We have the original English version, Chinese translation version and English backtranslation version of 183 reflexive questions (Appendix 2) used in therapy, and 394 questions (Appendix 3) from an educational questionnaire aimed for gathering data of the awareness of students for employing metacognition in their language studies. In this paper we conducted translation analysis on the mentioned two materials, using backtranslation as a tool to find out what are the types of mistakes we make that resulted in ignoring or failing to achieve psychological equivalency.
