Quantitative evaluation approach for translation of perceptual soundscape attributes: Initial application to the Thai Language

Translation of perceptual soundscape attributes from one language to another remains a challenging task that requires a high degree of fidelity in both psychoacoustic and psycholinguistic senses across the target population. Due to the inherently subjective nature of human perception, translating soundscape attributes using only small focus group discussions or expert panels could lead to translations with psycholinguistic meanings that, in a non-expert setting, deviate or distort from that of the source language. In this work, we present a quantitative evaluation method based on the circumplex model of soundscape perception to assess the overall translation quality. By establishing a set of criteria for evaluating the linguistic and psychometric properties of the translation candidates, statistical analyses can be performed to objectively assess specific strengths and weaknesses of the translation candidates before committing to listening tests or more involved validation experiments. As an initial application domain, we demonstrated the use of the quantitative evaluation framework in the context of an English-to-Thai translation of soundscape attributes. A total of 31 participants who are bilingual in English and Thai were recruited to assess the translation candidates. Subsequent statistical analysis of the evaluation scores revealed acoustico-psycholinguistic properties of the translation candidates which were not previously identified by the expert panel and facilitated a more objective selection of the final translations for subsequent usage. Additionally, with specific biases of the final translations determined numerically, mathematical and statistical techniques for corrections of the survey data may be employed in the future to improve cross-lingual compatibility in soundscape evaluation.