Dr. Kathleen R. Keeler
Fisher College of Business
The Ohio State University
Title: Lost in translation? A review and empirical examination of different approaches to translation and the factors that influence translation quality.
Abstract: It is becoming increasingly common for Industrial/Organizational psychologists and management scholars to utilize non-English speaking samples. Most researchers translate existing measures rather than develop new measures in the target language. This means that researchers need to ensure that the meaning of the construct is captured in the translation. Translation quality is affected by many factors and using a particular approach does not ensure measurement equivalency. We review leading general management and applied and cross-cultural psychology journals to examine how authors describe their translation process and what steps, if any, they take to ensure equivalency between original and translated versions of their measures. We then present an empirical examination of three approaches to translation (i.e., forward translation, back-translation, and the committee approach) using a sample of 4,000 Chinese participants and 250 US participants. We also empirically evaluate how variations in translator expertise influences translation quality. Specifically, we explore the influence of four different levels of translator expertise (bilingual, bilingual with content knowledge, professional translator, and professional translator with content knowledge) on translation quality.
Dr. Kathleen Keeler is an Assistant Professor of Management and Human Resources at the Max M. Fisher College of Business at the Ohio State University. She received a PhD in Organizational Behavior/Human Resources Management from Virginia Commonwealth University and a MA in Industrial/Organizational Psychology from George Mason University.
Dr. Keeler's research focuses on understanding the benefits and drawbacks of listening to music in the workplace. Specifically, she is interested in the reasons why people listen to certain types of music, how objective characteristics of music influence employee behavior and emotions, and the conditions under which music is most or least effective for various types of performance. Her theoretical account of how different characteristics of music (e.g., musical key, tempo, etc.) may differentially impact various types of job performance outcomes via self-regulatory processes was recently published in the Academy of Management Review. Her research interest in music in the workplace also ties with her research interests in organizational health climate and the work/non-work interface.
She also does research on various issues relating to research methods and statistics. Her work in this area has been published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, Organizational Research Methods, and Psychological Methods. In 2017, she and coauthors won the Sage Best Paper award for their paper "Degrees of freedom in SEM: Are we testing the models that we claim to test?" published in ORM.
