Scottish Gaelic

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Created 1/1/15 for original site, radically updated 22/2/19, updated broken links 15/1/20.

I have had no requests for a translation of any of the CORE instruments into Scottish Gaelic though I know that the CORE-OM is very widely used in Scotland and that the LD-CORE is definitely used there (colleagues from Edinburgh were heavily involved in the translation and other Scottish practitioners have carried out initial psychometric exploration of the LD-CORE-30).

No-one has expressed interest in co-leading forward translations into Scottish Gaelic and I suspect that the number of people who have only Scottish Gaelic in Scotland is tiny.  However, I believe there is requirement that at least some official or widely used Scottish documents must be available in both English and Scottish. Sadly, translating a self-report mental health questionnaire well is a very different job from translating official documents.

In fact, I have come round to feeling that the work involved is too much for almost anyone just volunteering in a spirit of generosity and passion for their language. That may have worked a decade ago when everyone, including me, had a bit more spare time, but it is generally a recipe for frustration now. The translation does work very well as a Masters student project and would work for someone doing psychology, psychotherapy, counselling, psychiatry/medicine or linguistics. The work of both translation and empirical exploration of the quantitative psychometrics of the translation works well as a Doctoral level project.

If you are interested or in a position to offer this either yourself as a masters or doctoral student looking for a project, or, probably more realistically, as a supervisor of such degrees, and a native Scottish speaker, do contact me (CE) please as I’d be very sorry to stop my translation work without a completed translation as it’s now one of the few European languages that aren’t even started.

Tangentially: there are 24 official languages of the European Union, we have translations of all but three of those: Estonian, Irish and Latvian are the missing ones. Scottish Gaelic is one of the five “semi-official” ones (with Basque/Euskera, Catalan, Galician/Gallego and Welsh/Cymraeg). Of those Catalan and
Welsh/Cymraeg translations have been done, I’d love to get all the official and semi-official EU languages done officially and well before I finally stop doing this!

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