Dialectal Variation and Pragmatic Appropriateness in the Adaptation of Assessment Instruments for Cuban Athletes: A Study of the Self-Injury Questionnaire
Keywords:
dialectal variation, Cuban Spanish, athlete assessment instruments, linguistic mediation, pragmatic appropriateness, non-suicidal self-injuryAbstract
Introduction: Differences between Peninsular Spanish and Cuban Spanish can change how an athlete understands an assessment instrument, particularly when the instrument was designed for speakers of a different variety. Accordingly, this study frames as its research problem how dialectal variation and certain pragmatic factors require an instrument's meaning to be reconfigured when it is adapted to Cuban sport.
Methods: This study followed a qualitative-instrumental design. Four specialists in applied linguistics reviewed the 17 items of the Self-Injury Questionnaire (Cédula de Autolesión) and recorded the lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic differences between the source variety (Peninsular Spanish) and the target variety (Cuban Spanish). Subsequently, 38 Cuban female handball players aged 15 to 18 evaluated the adapted version and indicated which items were clear to them and which were not.
Results: Thirteen of the 17 items (76.5 %) required modification. The changes fell into four categories: lexical substitutions due to dialectal variation (41.2 %), structural grammatical adjustments (23.5 %), pragmatic reformulations (17.6 %), and simplification of technical terminology (17.6 %). With the adapted version, comprehension reached 89.5 % among the athletes.
Conclusions: The findings confirm that linguistic mediation is not an incidental detail in athlete assessment when different dialectal varieties coexist. In addition, a typology of adjustments for Cuban Spanish is proposed, which may be applied in the sports domain. The final version is considered a preliminary adaptation, pending psychometric evidence.
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