Vamos a Traducir los MRV(Let’s Translate the VRM): Linguistic and Cultural Inferences Drawn from Translating a Verbal Coding System from English into Spanish

Abstract

Translating a verbal coding system from one language to another can yield unexpected insights into the process of communication in different cultures. This paper describes the problems and understandings we encountered as we translated a verbal response modes (VRM) taxonomy from English into Spanish. Standard translations of text (e.g., psychotherapeutic dialogue) systematically change the form of certain expressions, so supposedly equivalent expressions had different VRM codings in the two languages. Prominent examples of English forms whose translation had different codes in Spanish included tags, question forms, and "let's" expressions. Insofar as participants use such forms to convey nuances of their relationship, standard translations of counseling or psychotherapy sessions or other conversations may systematically misrepresent the relationship between the participants. The differences revealed in translating the VRM system point to subtle but important differences in the degrees of verbal directiveness and inclusion in English versus Spanish, which converge with other observations of differences in individualism and collectivism between Anglo and Hispanic cultures.

A pilot study of the Italian adaptation of the Session Evaluation Questionnaire fourth version

“…The replication of the dimensional structure of the SEQ in Italian was pursued taking into consideration what Beaton, Bombardier, Guillemin and Bosi Ferraz ( 2000 ), Caro and Stiles ( 1997 ), and Hambleton and Patsula ( 1999 ) reported about difficulties and potentially misleading results that a translation of a personality test or of a questionnaire can produce, even if some strategies such as backward translation are adopted.…”

The Decade 1989–1998 in Spanish Psychology: An Analysis of Research in Personality, Assessment, and Psychological Treatment (Clinical and Health Psychology)

“…Along this line, works focusing on verbal interaction processes in therapy are noteworthy. Based on Stiles' taxonomy of verbal response modes, these studies have examined whether patients and therapists interact and maintain different relation patterns as a function of their therapeutic evolution, and whether there are differences in therapists' verbal directiveness that are associated with cultural differences, as is reflected in the use of different verbal expressions specific to each language (Caro & Coscollá, 1997;Caro & Stiles, 1997).…”

The impact of psychotherapy sessions: Internal structure of the Dutch Session Evaluation Questionnaire (SEQ)

“…Caro and Stiles (1997) have addressed the problems that may arise when a (verbal) measure of psychological constructs is translated from one language to another. Standard translations of certain terms may be potentially misleading, even when these translations preserve denotative meaning.…”