Up coming research: Applying Ten Steps Translation Process in Quality of Life Scales

To be published in Formosan Journal of Medicine

Applying Ten Steps Translation Process in Quality of Life Scales

Ay-Woan Pan 12, Jin-Shei Lai 3, Helena Correia 3

Abstract: The DSM-5 published in 2013 by American Psychiatry Association identified that the following scales developed by the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement and Information System (PROMIS) can be applied to measure the functions of the persons with mental illness (anxiety, depression, sleep disturbance, and sleep-related impairment). The first author secured the permission to translate these five scales. The purpose of the study is to introduce the steps of the translation process we adapted which was developed by the PROMIS center. The procedure can be adapted by scholars who translate foreign developed scales related to feeling and health. It took us 9 months and 11 bilingual personnel to finish. We found that the items from Anger, depression and anxiety were hard to translate using the correct traditional Chinese. It might be because there is no accurate expression of feeling, psychological status and emotional status in traditional Chinese. Thus, we suggested adapting the procedure of “expert meeting”, “meeting of cross-cultural experts” and “cognitive debriefing”.
Key Words: translation, PROMIS, feeling-related scale, occupational therapy
(Full text in Chinese: Formosan J Med 2020;24:92-101) DOI:10.6320/FJM.202001_24(1).0010

1 School of Occupational Therapy, College of Medicine, National Taiwan University;
2 Department of Psychiatry, National Taiwan University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan;
3 Medical Social Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern
University, USA
Received: December 27, 2018 Accepted: April 30, 2019
Address correspondence to: Ay-Woan Pan, School of Occupational Therapy, College of Medicine, National Taiwan
University, Room 407, 4F., No. 17, Xuzhou Road, Taipei, Taiwan. E-mail: aywoan@ntu.edu.tw