The equivalence between the Mandarin Chinese and English versions of soundscape attributes: A cross-cultural comparison

Abstract

Soundscape attributes have become widely utilized across various languages for the assessment of acoustic environments in recent years. The objective of this study is to propose a new set of validated Chinese translations for soundscape attributes. To achieve this, translation and cross-cultural adaptation processes were conducted by soundscape experts and linguists without soundscape backgrounds, resulting in two distinct sets of Chinese soundscape attributes. Subsequently, 33 Chinese participants engaged in a listening experiment adhering to standardized materials and procedures, wherein they provided ratings for 12 translated versions of soundscape attributes across 27 audio stimuli. Principal component analysis (PCA) was used as a validation methodology for comparison of different translations. As seen from the Pearson’s correlation coefficients, r Chaotic (Cn1-Eng) = 0.952 (p < 0.01), the versions of the Chinese attributes translated by soundscape experts showed a higher degree of equivalence with their English counterparts than the versions translated by linguists who lacked a soundscape background. Statistical analysis of the collected data further indicated that the final translation of the 8 soundscape attributes predominantly aligns with their English counterparts. These findings suggest that the soundscape circumplex model, originally developed in English, manifests a comparable applicability within Chinese contexts.