How Argentine consumers understand the Spanish translation of the 9-point hedonic scale

The objective of this work was to study how ambiguous the meaning of the Sp anish translation of the 9-point hedonic scale was for Argentine consumers. Three versions of the 9-point hedonic scale were tested: a literal transla tion of the original English version, a liberal translation of this same sc ale and the liberal translation of a scale phrased for children (e.g. where 'like extremely' was replaced by 'super good'). Children, adolescents and adults from two cities of Argentina, making up a total of 288 subjects, per formed the tests. These consisted in ranking the phrases from each one of t he three scales from 'like least' to 'like most'. In most cases the scale p hrased for children performed best. Using this scale approximately. 30% of the subjects ranked the translated phrases differently in relation to the E nglish version, that is inverted the order of two or more phrases. The resu lts from the present work show that the use of the 9-point hedonic scale tr anslated to languages different to English should be done with caution. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.