A proposal for translating Perceived Affective Qualities for indoor environments into Brazilian Portuguese

ISO 12913-1:2014 proposed a standardized method to approach soundscape research in outdoor environments and formulated eight Perceived Affective Qualities (PAQs) to evaluate the soundscape. However, there is no standardized method for assessing indoor soundscapes. Torresin [1] proposed a similar method but with different PAQs defined in English. This article aims to establish a method for validating indoor PAQs in languages other than English, using the Portuguese spoken in Brazil as a case study. In the proposed method, bilingual acousticians and professional translators from English to Portuguese determined the synonyms of the PAQs. The data were tabulated and identified according to the group to which they belonged: English-Portuguese translators (group 1) and acousticians with knowledge of English (group 2). After grouping the responses, a descriptive analysis of the data was performed. Since the answers are open-ended, the main indicator of the analysis will be the percentage of times the answer was cited. Future studies could include searching for these synonyms on the Google platform and using data mining techniques to filter and extract contextual meaning, refining the data mining technique and applying the methods to other Portuguese-speaking regions, ultimately improving the understanding of soundscape evaluation in different linguistic and cultural contexts.