Translation and ethnopsychiatry: methodological questions in a transcultural perspective

A few descriptors of a translation theory are provided by anthropology, ethno-linguistic, socio-linguistic, psychology and philosophy. The first part of this paper offers an overview of translation and its multiple facets. An extensive literature review points to the heterogeneous profile of the studies concerning translation. Because of epistemological differences inherent in various approaches, linguistic, philosophical and psychological, these works are difficult to compare. Consequently, these peculiar difficulties offer a challenge to the enterprise of translation in psychiatry, especially in transcultural psychiatry. In the second part, translation concept and its applications are discussed, before presenting several exemples of methodological questions concerning translation procedures in psychiatry, according to the W.H.O. results concerning this subject. In this framework the descriptors of a translation theory in psychopathology and psychiatry are correlated to the role of culture and language effects, to social and individual factors and to the terms of the ethnology/psychoanalysis debate.