This open access book illustrates the key steps and procedures of developing mental health scales into linguistically and culturally appropriate translations. Through illustrative case studies, we demonstrate that traditional forward and backward translation have significant methodological limitations when applied in mental health scale translation, such as linguistic and cultural inaccessibility and inaccuracy in the clinic. Our book will stimulate more academic debates and further systematic research into the significant, interdisciplinary area of mental health translation, which has been underexplored in Translation Studies.

Yi Shan received his PhD in English and Applied Linguistics from Tongji University, China. He is currently a professor at Jiaxing University. His main research interests include discourse analysis with a special emphasis on pragmatics, research methods in linguistics, and health translation. He has published papers in international journals, including Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Frontiers in Psychology, International Journal of Multilingualism, SAGE Open, Pozan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, Atlantis English Studies, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Journal of Medical Internet Research, etc. 

Meng Ji received the first PhD in Translation Studies from Imperial College London. Her research interests include language and cultural translation research methodologies, multicultural and disability inclusive health translation, machine translation risk monitoring for migrant healthcare services. She has authored and edited more than thirty research books in English, French and Italian. Her research has used first-hand data from minority and less-resourced languages to elucidate the complexity of language and cultural translations in specialised communicative settings.