Translating the Grievance Dictionary: a psychometric evaluation of Dutch, German, and Italian versions

TL;DR

This study translates and psychometrically evaluates the Grievance Dictionary into Dutch, German, and Italian, assessing their reliability and comparability to the original English version for analyzing grievance-related texts.

Contribution

It introduces a systematic translation and validation process for the Grievance Dictionary in multiple languages, expanding its applicability beyond English.

Findings

Dutch and German versions show similar reliability to English

Italian version exhibits lower reliability in some categories

Provides guidelines for future dictionary translation and validation

Abstract

This paper introduces and evaluates three translations of the Grievance Dictionary, a psycholinguistic dictionary for the analysis of violent, threatening or grievance-fuelled texts. Considering the relevance of these themes in languages beyond English, we translated the Grievance Dictionary to Dutch, German, and Italian. We describe the process of automated translation supplemented by human annotation. Psychometric analyses are performed, including internal reliability of dictionary categories and correlations with the LIWC dictionary. The Dutch and German translations perform similarly to the original English version, whereas the Italian dictionary shows low reliability for some categories. Finally, we make suggestions for further validation and application of the dictionary, as well as for future dictionary translations following a similar approach.