Translation of soundscape perceptual attributes from English to Turkish

Abstract

The International Standard Organization (ISO) published the standard series on soundscape for the identification, data collection and data analysis. However, since all these standards are in English language, the reliable standardized usage in other languages and its applicability is questionable. Thus, this two-staged study aims: i) to determine the Turkish equivalences of the 8 soundscape perceptual attributes that are published in ISO/TS 12913–2:2018 and ISO/TS 12913–3:2019, ii) to analyze if the determined Turkish attributes have concept equivalence to the original ones, and iii) to determine if the translated Turkish scale is reproducible. The first stage involved the translation of the attributes by focus group discussions and finalization by Turkish linguistic experts. As a result, the attributes ‘eventful’, ‘vibrant’, ‘pleasant’, ‘calm’, ‘uneventful’, ‘monotonous’, ‘annoying’, and ‘chaotic’ are translated to Turkish as ‘hareketli’, ‘coşkulu’, ‘keyifli’, ‘sakin’, ‘durağan’, ‘tekdüze’, ‘rahatsız edici’, and ‘karmaşık’, respectively. The second stage involves the analysis of reproducibility in terms of inter-rater reliability and conceptual validity. It is found that the Turkish scale is reproducible based on high inter-rater reliability in all attributes. Context validity at a conceptual level is analyzed both in terms of the difference between the average scores given to the English attributes and their corresponding Turkish equivalences and the correlation between the English and Turkish scores given to each attribute. The highest difference between the average scores (around 10 points on a slider scale of 0 to 100) is found to be in the translation of ‘vibrant’ while the lowest correlated one (slightly lower than 0.5) is found in ‘chaotic’ attribute as in line with literature. Despite this result, when the scores are reduced to 2 dimensions as pleasantness and eventfulness, it is seen that there is a high correlation between the English and Turkish scales. It is considered that the results obtained from this research could act as a base in the future for the establishment of Turkish Standards on soundscape and standardization of the translated and validated Turkish soundscape perceptual attributes and the ‘perceived affective quality’ scale defined under ISO/TS 12913–2:2018 in English.