Achieving linguistic clarity: a model to aid translations

An international validation study of selected NANDA nursing diagnoses prompted the development of a linguistic model for standardizing and operationalizing the defining characteristics. The translation of NANDA-approved defining characteristics into Portuguese illuminated problems related to the way that sentences, phrases, and words are used. Defining characteristics were reduced into the simplest linguistic components--words. In Portuguese translation, all of the major NANDA-defining characteristics were classified into two alphabetized lists as single-word phenomena/states or qualifiers. Linguistic standardization permitted similar expressions of the defining characteristics in Portuguese and English.