Soundscape Descriptors in 18 Languages: Soundscape Attributes Translation Project Update
Describing the soundscapes around us can vary widely – terms like pleasant, annoying, calm, quiet, vibrant, or lively are often used. For researchers in soundscape and noise pollution, standard adjectives and attributes are essential tools for understanding people’s perceptions of acoustic environments through surveys and questionnaires. However, the nuances of meaning can be “lost in translation” between languages, posing a risk of misguiding designers and policymakers who shape noise policies and soundscape interventions.
To bridge this gap, a global team, led by University College London, initiated an informal international collaboration with soundscape researchers worldwide. The Soundscape Attributes Translation Project (SATP), involves 57 researchers from various countries providing “educated guesses” to translate the semantic scales of the ISO 12913 series of standards.
The work has culminated in a journal article recently published in Applied Acoustics – “Soundscape descriptors in eighteen languages: Translation and validation through listening experiments”. The paper focuses on eighteen languages – namely: Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese – and employs a four-step procedure to evaluate the reliability and cross-cultural validity of translated soundscape descriptors.
The SATP initiative’s evaluation of translations successfully preserved the quasi-circumplex structure in most languages, ensuring reliable and cross-cultural validity of soundscape descriptors. Introducing a three-tier confidence level based on adjusted angles highlighted their importance in refining circumplex scale locations, with languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, and others showing “High” confidence levels. Conversely, French, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Portuguese, and Vietnamese displayed varying confidence levels, indicating translation challenges.
The SATP initiative constitutes the first systematic attempt to harmonize soundscape data collection protocols in several different languages at once. It is hoped that the outcomes of the SATP will support widespread adoption of validated soundscape descriptors, both in academia and practice.
For more details, the reader is referred to:
Soundscape descriptors in eighteen languages: Translation and validation through listening experiments, Applied Acoustics, Volume 224, 2024, 110109, ISSN 0003-682X, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2024.110109.
