I am designing a survey on facial recognition technology that will be deployed in both English and French. The English version of the survey has been professionally translated, and it looks very good as far as I can tell (though I have to rely on high school french and Google translate to check this!).

One concern I have, though, is with the five-point Likert scale. This will be used by respondents to evaluate 27 UTAUT statements (based on Venkatesh et al., 2003). Page et al. (2022) report on their efforts to translate the UTAUT-2 questionnaire (which is helpful) but they only label the end-points (i.e., strongly agree / strongly disagree) of their seven-point scale - leaving the rest of the options blank. (This might be my best option here; several examples I found in the literature only label the end points. Nonetheless, I'm interested in how to translate all five points in the scale).

My original English scale is:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Neither disagree nor agree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

The professional translator rendered this as:

• Fortement en désaccord
• En désaccord
• Neutre
• En accord
• Fortement en accord

One version I found is in Belley-Ranger, Carbonneau and Trudeau (2021), who use this scale:

• Fortement en désaccord [strongly disagree]
• En désaccord [disagree]
• Ni en désaccord ou en accord [neither disagree nor agree]
• En accord [agree]
• Fortement en accord [strongly agree]

However, Haggerty, Bouharaoui and Santor (2011) provide these perspectives:

• “strongly disagree” seems to be more negative than “fortement en désaccord.” “Pas du tout d'accord” (not at all in agreement) might be a better translation of “strongly disagree.”
• They detected differences in how response options were interpreted between "agree" and "disagree". The observed difference suggests that "disagree" may not be equivalent to “désaccord”; rather, it seems to be a different concept rather than the opposite of “accord” (though they don't suggest an alternative).
• They also suggest "strongly agree" / "fortement en accord" might be problematic but don't offer a suggestion.

To summarize:

• Should "Strongly disagree" be translated as "Fortement en désaccord", “Pas du tout d'accord”, or something else?
• Should "Disagree" be translated as "en désaccord" or "ne pas d'accord", or something else?
• Should "Neither disagree nor agree" be translated as "ni en désaccord ou en accord" or "Neutre"
• Should "Agree" be translated as "d'accord" or "en accord", or something else?
• Should "Strongly agree" be translated as "Fortement en accord", “Entièrement d'accord”, or something else?

Appreciate any thoughts.

References

Belley-Ranger, E., Carbonneau, H., & Trudeau, F. (2021). Psychometric properties of the French version of Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (B-SSS). European Review of Applied Psychology = Revue Europeenne de Psychologie Appliquee, 71(3), 100655.

Haggerty, J. L., Bouharaoui, F., & Santor, D. A. (2011). Differential item functioning in primary healthcare evaluation instruments by french/english version, educational level and urban/rural location. Healthcare Policy = Politiques de Sante, 7(Spec Issue), 47–65.

Pagé, I., Roos, M., Collin, O., Lynch, S. D., Lamontagne, M.-E., Massé-Alarie, H., & K Blanchette, A. (2022). UTAUT2-based questionnaire: cross-cultural adaptation to Canadian French. Disability and Rehabilitation, 1–8.

Venkatesh, V., Morris, M. G., Davis, G. B., & Davis, F. D. (2003). User Acceptance of Information Technology: Toward a Unified View. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 27(3), 425–478.