Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Linguistically Compare Test Translations: A Methodological Introduction and Demonstration

The validity and utility of translated instruments (psychological measures) depend on the quality of their translation, and differences in key linguistic characteristics could introduce bias. Likewise, linguistic differences between instruments designed to measure analogous constructs might contribute to similar instruments possessing dissimilar psychometrics. This article introduces and demonstrates the use of natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of artificial intelligence, to linguistically analyze 13 translations of two psychological measures previously translated into numerous languages. NLP was used to generate estimates reflecting specific linguistic characteristics of test items (emotional tone/intensity, sentiment, valence, arousal, and dominance), which were then compared across translations at both the test- and item-level, as well as between the two instruments. Results revealed that key linguistic characteristics can profoundly vary both within and between tests. Following a discussion of results, the current limitations of this approach are summarized and strategies for advancing this methodology are proposed.