Translation and Adaptation of the English Story Retell Procedure to Portuguese: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Introduction: The comprehension and production of connected language is essential to effective communication. However, few assessment and intervention programs requiring connected language have been made available in Brazilian-Portuguese. One connected language sampling procedure, the Story Retell Procedure (SRP), has been widely studied in English and primarily for people with aphasia. The SRP employs 12 stories, whose individual plots are quite different and still equivalent in terms of verbal productivity measures. The first objective of this study was to present the translation and adaptation of the SRP stories into Portuguese and to determine whether the translations are similar to English stories. The second objective was to analyze a small group of healthy adult’s responses to this assessment, thus observing whether the retellings of the SRP story forms in Portuguese would be similar to each other in the number of words, information units (IUs), and propositions – as demonstrated in English. Methods: This preliminary study translated and adapted into Portuguese, the 12 original English SRP stories. Only small cultural adaptations were made, preserving the essential content of the stories. The stories were then presented to 14 healthy adults, and the participants’ retellings from each story were compared to the other stories regarding the number of words, IUs, and propositions. Results: Few differences were found in the retellings considering the variables analyzed. Particularly, the retells of Gasolina (Gas), Biblioteca (Library) Empréstimo (Loan) Sanduíche (Sandwich), Futebol (Baseball) and Multas (Ticket) were not significantly different in the three aspects investigated in this study (percentages of words, IUs, and propositions). Discussion/Conclusion: The SRP stories adapted to Portuguese, despite having a quite close number of words, IUs, and propositions to those in the original stories, did not result in retellings with similar number of words, IUs or propositions across stories. Nonetheless, the parameters analyzed were not significantly different among the majority of the stories, and some were nearly identical. This study identified the SRP stories that can be equivalently used in assessment, reassessment, and possibly in the rehabilitation of patients with communication disorders. Likewise, differences must be considered when the stories are used with pathological populations.