Translation, Language and Semantics Issues

Abstract

At the outset of the EuroQol enterprise English was used as the working language. Those members of the Group whose mother tongues were not English helped to construct the EuroQol instrument in ways that the language and concepts being used and the constructs being developed using English could then be applied in the context of their own languages. This was inevitably a time-consuming, and often tiring, approach. There were times when after hours of work on some aspect of the instrument, perhaps the labelling of a dimension, and relief at what appeared to be final agreement, someone would speak up: “you cannot say that in Dutch”. Discussion of the topic in question had to be reopened. So issues of semantics, wording and language were well to the fore from the early days. These issues can be mostly subsumed under the shorthand heading ‘translation’, and we can trace work undertaken in this area by looking at a variety of sources: the proceedings of Plenary, Liaison Officers, and Executive Committee Meetings, and in particular by reporting the important work undertaken in the context of the EQ-net project. More recently, translation issues have been important in the development of the EQ-5D-5L.