182 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-25, NO.4, DECEMBER 1982

A Method for Translating Technical to Nontechnical ProsePARKER H. JOHNSON, JUDITH GARRARD, AND WILLIAM HAUSMAN

Abstract-To translate technical language for professionals intoordinary language for lay readers, we developed a five-step method:(1) Standardize the technical language; (2) produce a nontechnicalversion; (3) test the nontechnical version with lay readers to determinewhere the translation was unsuccessful; (4) determine the reading­grade level of the translation; and (5) statistically correlate the ac­curacy of the translation with the original. This method was used witha set of 200 educational objectives in the mental-health field and steps3-5 verified that the translation was accurate and comprehensible.The process is explained and is directly applicable to technical prosein other fields.

I NF LUENTIAL groups like the legal, scientific, engineering,and business professions have begun to recognize the diffi­

culty of translating their languages accurately into language alay reader can understand. Contracts, payment plans, insur­ance policies, surgical consent forms, and scientific reportsdirected to the consumer market must be understood by a layaudience. Clear, readable, accurate translation of technical lan­guage is needed, but the way to do this translating remainsvague. This paper describes a method for translating technicallanguage into ordinary prose, as well as three tests that validatethe accuracy of the translation. Our five-step method pro­duced technical and nontechnical versions of a set of educa­tional objectives whose parallel meanings were understood inthe same way-according to a statistical correlation-by bothprofessional and lay readers.

BACKGROUND

Our goal in the Mental Health Education Research Projectwas to find out what university teachers thought should betaught to their students in the fields of psychiatry, psychiatricnursing, and social work. We wanted to identify educators' pri­orities in these fields. In addition, we wanted to compare theseeducators' priorities with those of consumers. We defined theconsumer as an actual or potential recipient of mental healthservices-in other words, the lay person.

To compare educator and lay priorities for the education ofmental health professionals, we developed a set of 200 educa­tional objectives. These objectives were to be ranked by eachresearch subject in a task called a Priority Sort. We wanted touse the same set of objectives for subjects who were universityfaculty members in psychiatry, psychiatric nursing, and socialwork as for lay people in the community who had no more

Reprinted with permission from the Journal of Technical Writingand Communication, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 191-200, 1982~ copyright 1982by Baywood Publishing Co., Inc., Farmingdale, NY.

The authors are at the University of Minnesota: P. H. Johnson iswith the Department of English, J. Garrard with the School of PublicHealth, and W. Hausman with the Department of Psychiatry; addresscorrespondence to Parker Johnson, 207 Church Street SE, Minneapolis,MN 55455, (612) 373-2540.

than a high school education and were not familiar with tech­nical terms in mental health.

The initial set of 200 objectives, written in technical lan­guage at a professional or postgraduate reading level, had to betranslated into nontechnical language at a high school readinglevel. For example, the objective Intervention with acutely de­pressed clients/patients, written for the professional, had to betranslated into a sentence like Mental health professionals needto be able to help people who suddenly become severely de­pressed. Furthermore, we had to establish a close statistical re­lationship between the two sets of objectives-technical andnontechnical-because we wanted to combine the results fromboth versions in research with future subjects. Two sets weredeveloped because the imprecision of the nontechnical lan­guage irritated professional subjects whereas consumers couldnot understand the technical language meant for professionals.Our solution to these problems was to develop a systematicstrategy for translating technical to nontechnical prose.

METHOD

The strategy we developed had five steps. Each of thesesteps is described in greater detail below, with examples ofhow each step was accomplished in our project.

1. Technical version Develop and standardize the languageof the technical objective.

2. Nontechnical version Rewrite the objectives in nontech­nical language.

3. Comprehension By field testing, determine whether layreaders can understand the nontechnical version; rewrite asnecessary.

4. Reading level Establish the reading level of the nontech­nical material.

s. Parallel versions Demonstrate that the two versions areparallel by computing the statistical relationship betweentest results for professional and lay subjects.

Step 1. Technical Version

The technical language of the drafted objectives varied;however, once these materials were produced, the languagewas standardized to ensure grammatical consistency and thenverified and modified as necessary by experts.

The objectives written in technical language were standard­ized so that each was a noun phrase. The following rules weredeveloped in response to inconsistent forms, diction, andpunctuation in the list of objectives. Similar rules could be de­veloped for standardizing other kinds of technical language.The basic pattern was the noun phrase, consisting of an op­tional adjective or adjectives preceding the noun, which couldbe followed by an optional prepositional phrase or phrases.

Four kinds of revision were made: syntactic, punctuation,lexical, and minor.

JOHNSON etal.: TRANSLATING TECHNICAL TO NONTECHNICAL PROSE 183

• Syntactic revision

Rule 1 To simplify the objectives and make them consistent,wherever possible the prepositional phrase was con­verted to an adjective. For example, the educationalobjective Mental health problems in adolescents be­came Adolescent mental health problems. This trans­formation rule was applied to 35 of the 75 objectivesthat were revised.

Rule 2 Words like "skill," "theory," and "family" were madeconsistently plural.

Rule 3 Ten objectives that began with an imperative verb formwere nominalized to produce a noun phrase. For ex­ample, Use consultation appropriately was changed toAppropriate use ofconsultation.

• Punctuation revision

Rule 4 All slashes were replaced by conjunctions.Rule 5 A comma was added after the penultimate item in a

list ..

• Lexical revision

Rule 6 One of a pair of words that seemed to overspecifyneedlessly was deleted.

Rule 7 In one objective, a word was added when a termseemed underspecified.

Rule 8 Some words were changed to make them consistentwith other similar objectives, to produce an idiomaticphrase, or to eliminate wordiness.

• Minor revision

Rule 9 Corrections were made to possessives, articles wereadded, hyphens were replaced by conjunctions, andword order was revised.

The following are examples of educational objectives writ­ten in standardized technical language according to these rules:

1. Leadership skills in group therapy2. Understanding ofmilieu therapy3. Schizophrenic disorders4. Patient's difficulty with significant people in current life

situation5. Therapist's use ofproblem solving process.

Step 2. Nontechnical Version

Once the standardized technical objectives were available,the actual translation process began. The goal in our projectwas to create a set of objectives that could be understood bypeople with a high school education. In reviewing the litera­ture and discussing this goal with reading experts (includingcounselors who work with illiterate adults), we learned thatthe average high school graduate has a ninth-to-tenth gradereading level. We were also able to determine that the majornewspapers in this metropolitan area are aimed approximatelyat this reading level.

We developed the following guidelines for translation tonontechnical prose:

1. Use a complete sentence structure that includes an actor.We decided to begin each item with Mental health profes­sionals need to....

2. Supply an infinitive complement for the sentence. Weused "to know" to represent knowledge; "to understand" torepresent the application of theory to practice or to indicatethat a particular disorder or event could not be conclusivelyexplained by existing theory; and "to be able to" to representskills.

3. In referring to the individual who receives mental healthservices, use the term "person" and avoid "client" or "pa­tient" except in those rare cases where a treatment or condi­tion applied logically only to someone in a hospital.

4. In the case of highly technical objectives, let the originalterm remain in the translated version but explain it with a defi­nition in simpler language that admittedly may not encompassall of its meanings.

No rigid methodology exists for this translating processanalogous to the rules that were used to standardize thegrammar of the technical objectives. Our procedure was todraft a series of objectives in the simplest vocabulary and syn­tax we could conceive. This drafting was done alternatively byprofessionals in mental health and educational psychology andby a consultant who could describe the differences betweentechnical and nontechnical writing. The drafts were then dis­cussed in a series of meetings with all concerned. Each objec­tive was discussed individually and an approved translationwas agreed upon.

These meetings, in which educators from three mentalhealth fields, a consumer representative, an educational psy­chologist, a writing consultant, and other research workers par­ticipated, were an essential part of our effort. Given the draftof the translated objective, the research group as a whole dis­cussed the appropriateness of each word, the syntactical ar­rangement of the sentence, the possible effects of diction andphrasing, and the degree to which the technical language couldbe "watered down." The translating was not done by a singlewriter and then successively reviewed and approved by othersin a hierarchy, all of them gradually revising the original draftbeyond recognition. Our translation was a collaborative effortby a heterogeneous group. The translation was a continuous,inductive process in which the concern for fidelity to the tech­nical term was in constant conflict with the demand for verbalsimplicity.

The following are the nontechnical versions of the five edu­cational objectives written in technical language under step 1:

1. Mental health professionals need to be able to lead a groupofpeople who meet together for psychological treatment.

2. Mental health professionals need to know how hospital orclinic surroundings, especially fellow patients and staff, andplanned programs can help a person who is mentally ill.

3. Mental health professionals need to know about schizo­phrenic disorders; in other words, irrational behavior that

184 lEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION, VOL. PC-25, NO.4, DECEMBER 1982

usually includes disorganized thinking or feeling and loss ofcontact with reality.

4. Mental health professionals need to understand that peoplewith emotional problems can have difficulty with impor­tant people in their lives.

5. Mental health professionals need to be able to help peopledefine problems, set goals to solve problems, and find different ways to get to their goals.

Step 3. ComprehensionAlthough step 2 of this method results in a nontechnical

translation of the material, we are convinced that this thirdstep of checking the understandability of the' nontechnicalversion is essential. In our experience, lay people had alterna­tive interpretations of the nontechnical objectives that werelogical, and in some instances quite accurate, but these inter­pretations had not been recognized by the research group.Thus, the purpose of step 3 was to ask a sample of lay peoplewhether they understood the translation. This step was not assimple as it would appear, however. If we ask people to tell uswhat objectives are incomprehensible, they must either admittheir own ignorance-an embarrassing admission-or give a falseimpression of the translation by saying they do understandwhat in fact they do not.

Our solution to this problem was to break the task into sim­ple steps and create a collaborative situation in which the layperson was placed in the role of the expert. The testing situa­tion we designed required that each objective, printed on anindividual card, be examined by the subject. We randomly as­signed the 200 nontechnical objectives to four decks of cardsconsisting of 50 objectives each. To check the validity of thesubjects' responses we included two highly technical objec­tives in every deck. These two objectives, which we suspectno lay people have encountered, were

A.Mental health professionals need to understand transientsituational disturbances.

B. Mental health professionals need to understand neuroendo­crinological factors in psychiatric symptoms.

Also, two of the nontechnical objectives were duplicatedin each deck to check whether this duplication was detectedby the subject or, alternatively, whether the two copies of ob­jectives were placed in the same category.

Instructions for this task consisted of the following:

We are trying to improve the information on thesecards and would like your advice about how we shoulddo this. What we are asking you to do is to read thesecards and put each into one of three piles.

Tell us which card is more or less important to you inthe education of the mental health professional. In otherwords, in your opinion, what is more important and whatis less important. Put these cards in the "More Important"or the "Less Important" pile.

Also, tell us which cards are hard to understand; inother words, which cards are so technical that we shouldgo back and try to rewrite them. Put these cards in the"Hard to Understand" pile. You may find some cardsthat are a little hard to understand but you can stillmake some sense out of them and can decide if they are"More Important" or "Less Important." In this case, tellus which cards are a little hard to understand and we'llrecord the code num ber of the card.

These instructions were usually explained rather than read tothe subject.

Twenty-five subjects were in the Comprehension Study, alltested by staff of the project in a one-to-one situation. Thefirst group of subjects was from a senior citizens' high-rise res­idence. Of the 13 subjects, four had not completed highschool, six were high school graduates, and three had somecollege experience or a baccalaureate degree. This testingresulted in 14 objectives that were clearly identified as hard tounderstand. After the staff revision of these and other objec­tives, we decided to include the hard-to-understand version ofthe 14 objectives and their revisions in separate decks. Thus,each of the four decks was expanded by three or four addi­tional objectives.

The next round of testing was at an inner city communitymental health center. There we were able to test four highschool graduates, all of whom were black females who wereclerks at the center. The results showed that eight of the 14original objectives were assigned to the "Hard to Understand"pile but none of their revised counterparts was so categorized.At that point we discarded the original objectives and left the14 revised ones in the deck.

In the third and final round of testing in the Comprehen­sion Study, we went to an inner city church. In this setting thepastor, who coordinates the weekly distribution of freeclothing, asked for volunteers from the recipients who hadassembled for that purpose. Eight people volunteered. One hada sixth grade education, the rest were high school graduates;four were native Americans. The results of this testing showedthat the main problem with the objectives now appeared to beconceptual. Although someone could recognize a word, suchas "research," he or she could not understand what it reallymeant. At this point we felt that subjects were having diffi­culty because of lack of experience rather than the complexityof the language; we made only minor revisions after this roundand considered the nontechnical deck to be in its final version.

The process of testing, revising, and testing again in an it­erative sequence is important. The translated objectives weremodified after each test and, in some cases, confusion pro­duced by a nontechnical version led to a revision of the origi­nal technical objective. After the testing and revision of step 3were completed, we were fairly certain that we had a set oftranslated objectives that lay readers could understand.

Step 4. Reading Level

When the Comprehension Study was completed, all the ob­jectives in the nontechnical deck were analyzed for readabilityusing the Dale-Chall readability formula [1]. We also com­puted a readability score for each of 20 sets of objectives-tenobjectives per set. Of these 20 sets, two fell into the seventh­to-eight grade level, nine into the ninth-to-tenth grade level,eight into the eleventh-to-twelfth grade level, and one into thethirteenth-to-fifteenth grade level. According to the readabilityanalysis, our objectives were heavily clustered in the ninth-to­tenth and eleventh-to-twelfth grade levels, indicating that mostsubjects with a high school education should be able to under­stand them.

The readability of the 14 hard-to-understand objectives(identified in the first round of testing) and of their revisionswas also calculated. On the basis of a t-test, there was no sta-

JOHNSON et al.: TRANSLATING TECHNICAL TO NONTECHNICAL PROSE 185

tistically significant difference in readability between the twosets. For example, the readability score for Mental health pro­fessionals should understand role theories; that is, how peo­ple's behaviors are related to what is expected of them byothers who are important to them and by society, is the sameas for the revised version, Mental health professionals need tounderstand role theories; in other words, how people's behav­iors are influenced by jobs, family, friends, and other peoplearound them. Yet the revision is more understandable. Thesuccess of the revised version is easily accounted for: The dic­tum from hundreds of composition handbooks, "Be concrete,use examples," made the revised version understandable.This testing seems to bear out the well known view that reada­bility studies alone cannot predict whether or how a givenpiece of prose will be understood, nor can such studies isolatewhere the difficulty in comprehension arises.

Step 5. Parallel VersionsIf the purpose of the nontechnical materials is to provide

information to the lay person in language that he or she canunderstand, then steps 1 through 4 provide the basis for sys­tematic translation from technical to nontechnical prose. Onthe other hand, if both the professional and the lay person areexpected to make decisions based on the same information beingprovided in technical and nontechnical versions, respectively,then a fifth step, that of documenting the relationship be­tween the two versions, is necessary.

Our approach to verifying that two versions of the samematerial are communicating the same basic information was toexamine the statistical relationship between the ranking ofboth versions in a Priority Sort. We selected six experts fromeach of the three professions we were studying, i.e., psychi­atry, psychiatric nursing, and social work, and six lay peoplewho were quite sophisticated about the mental health systemand knowledgeable about professional terms. Each of these24 subjects was tested with the same ranking task, the PrioritySort, that would be used in subsequent stages of our experi­mental study. In this task each person was given a deck of 200cards with one objective per card and instructed to assign eachobjective to one of ten levels of priority. Upon completionthere should be an equal number of cards at each level, i.e., 20cards per pile from a deck of 200 objectives.

The 24 subjects in this parallel-version study completed aPriority Sort with one of the versions, and two weeks laterwith the other version. We assumed that subjects would not beable to remember the priority they had assigned to specificobjectives because of the large number of cards and the two­week time span. We recognized, however, that sorting one ver­sion of the deck might have some effect on sorting the other.We counteracted this possible order effect by assigning techni­cal and nontechnical versions in random order. These assign­ments were made within each sample of six subjects; for ex­ample, the technical version was sorted first by three psychia­trists and the nontechnical version first by the other three psy­chiatrists. When the 24 subjects had completed the PrioritySort of both versions, we computed a Pearson product mo­ment correlation coefficient [2] between the two versions foreach subject. The average correlation was +0.59, which is mod­erately high. For purposes of this study, this level of statisticalagreement was satisfactory.

If this level of agreement between the two versions had notbeen satisfactory, our strategy would have been to examinethe mean priority scores of the six subjects within each dis­cipline or the consumer group and identify those objectivesthat showed the greatest difference between the two versions.The nontechnical version would have been revised and anotherparallel-version study would have been made with the revisionsincluded. The new sample of subjects would have to completea Priority Sort based on all 200 objectives and the possible or­der effect would be controlled by counterbalancing randomlywhich version of the deck was sorted first and which second,with a two-week period in between. In other words, the meth­odology of the first study would have been replicated entirelyin the second study if the resulting correlation coefficient wasto be regarded as comparable and valid.

The specific task designed to examine the statistical rela­tionship between technical and nontechnical versions of thematerial may not be necessary in other translating projects;however, the precautions taken to control order effect (byrandomly assigning each version), memory effect (by spacingthe tasks two weeks apart), and representativeness of thesample (by selecting subjects from the same populations, e.g.,the three disciplines and consumer groups) should all be takeninto account in other studies regardless of the content of theprose.

SUMMARYAt the outset we seriously doubted that a highly technical

"dialect" could be recast accurately into ordinary language.The method we developed for the translation worked, how­ever. It worked for two reasons: The translation itself was acollaborative rather than a hierarchical effort, and the transla­tions were validated in several ways. Translation and validationinformed each other. What we assumed about readability andabout subjects who would be tested influenced the way wethought about writing and rewriting our material; the resultswe found in the testing of our subjects and in the readabilitystudy reinforced or altered the linguistic constraints we ac­knowledged during the translating. The effort we made to vali­date our work was crucial. First, the translating was done andsupervised by highly qualified experts in the field. Second, thetranslated material was tested, in the Comprehension Study,with subjects who had to respond to the writing. Third, reada­bility scores verified that our translations were appropriate forthe target audiences. No single, simple validation method willserve; the combination we used assures that we achieved ourgoal of turning technical language intended for a professionalaudience into ordinary language intended for a lay reader.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTThe research reported in this paper was carried out under

project T24-MH15430 funded by the Experimental ProjectsBranch, Division of Manpower and Training Programs, Na­tional Institute for Mental Health; Judith Garrard and WilliamHausman, coprincipal investigators.

REFERENCES[ I] E. Dale and J. S. Chall, ••A Formula for Predicting Readability,"

Educational Research Bulletin. vol. 27, pp. 11-20, Jan. 21. and pp.37-54, Feb. 18, 1948. -

[2] A Pearson product moment correlation coefficient can range from+ 1.00 (meaning perfect direct relationship) to 0.00 (meaning norelationship) to -1.00 (meaning perfect inverse relationship).