The translation equivalence of the Effort Scale between Chinese and Portuguese travel agents
Main Article Content
The problem of establishing translation equivalence of the Effort Scale (O’Neil & Snow, 1990) to Chinese and Portuguese was examined with the goal of conducting cross-cultural research on attributions of success and failure in the travel industry of Taiwan and Brazil. The methods of establishing translation equivalence utilized here included a judgmental back-translation method and a statistical method. A group of 80 bilingual travel agents made up of 34 Brazilian travel agents and 46 Chinese travel agents, of ages ranging from 25 to 40 years old, completed the source and target versions of the Effort Scale.
Statistical analysis supported the hypotheses that both versions were equivalent to the original instrument. Yet, when comparing Chinese and Brazilian correlation coefficients by the Fisher test, it was found that the correlation from the Chinese translated scale was more significant than that obtained for the Portuguese scale (r of Chinese sample = 0.98, Portuguese sample = 0.91; Z = 2.57, p < 0.05). The results also demonstrate that the homogeneity of a sample would lower the reliability coefficient of a scale, as in the case of the Brazilian sample in this study.
Table 1. Results for Each Sample
References
O’Neil, H. F., Jr., & Snow, R. (1990). [Effort scale.] Unpublished raw data.
O’Neil, H. F., Jr., & Snow, R. (1990). [Effort scale.] Unpublished raw data.
Table 1. Results for Each Sample
Appreciation is due to anonymous reviewers.