PRM163 - When is it Evening, When is it Night? why it is Challenging to Translate Times of the Day in Clinical Translations

Abstract

Questionnaires often use different times of day to indicate when a subject should complete tasks such as taking medicine, making diary entries, or visiting their doctor. Often this has to be done/reported on at the same time daily or weekly (e.g. “did you forget to take your evening dose?”) Terms for times of day do not necessarily have equivalents in other languages. We investigated translations of times of day as they relate to patient reported outcomes questionnaires. We explored times of the day and their meanings across 15 languages: Morning, day, midday/noon, afternoon, evening, night, middle of the night, and midnight, asking linguists to explain the terms used in their language. some languages do have exact equivalents for the same term in English. For example, the term “midnight” has a direct translation and meaning for 100% of the languages. However, about 40% did not have an exact equivalent for “morning”: In Arabic and Chinese “morning” meant only the time from sun rise to noon. In Tamil this is also the case but for the hours just before sunrise there is a term which translates to “early morning” and includes from 1am to 5am. In Russian, the hours of 1, 2 and 3am are strictly night. Morning starts at 4 or 5am. The term for “evening” is challenging to translate with 40% stating this is subjective. Other examples include: in Argentina “evening” and “night” are the same term. In modern Greek a new term meaning “small night” is entering the language as an equivalent to “evening, but is the period of 2hrs after the sun sets”. Due to differences in, and subjective interpretation of, terms for time of day across the globe, it is helpful to specify time periods in questionnaires to ensure understanding by subjects, translatability and harmonization.