 2. History, Measurement, and Conceptual Elaboration of the Big‑Five Trait Taxonomy  45
to Extraversion and probably means some -
thing close to bubbly .
An initial study of German–  English bi -
linguals, which provided support for cross- 
language generalizability (John et al., 1984), 
directly addressed the issue of translation 
equivalence. The unique advantage of the 
bilingual design is that sample differences 
can be controlled, and translation checks 
can be made at the level of individual items, 
because the same subject provides descrip -
tions in both languages (see also Benet- 
Martinez & John, 1998). Using a careful 
back-  translation procedure, John and col -
leagues (1984) found acceptable levels of 
translation equivalence between English 
and German trait adjectives, with a mean 
correlation of .52 across a 2-week interval 
between administrations. However, a few 
translations proved to be inadequate, with 
item–  translation correlations approaching 
zero. These findings, obtained for closely re -
lated languages, suggest that mistranslations 
of single trait adjectives are even more likely 
to occur in monolingual investigations of 
personality structure and lead to severe un -
derestimations of cross-  language generality.
Rules for Including Trait Descriptors in 
Taxonomic Studies.  In addition to transla -
tion problems, some of the differences among 
factor structures in different languages are 
due to the different inclusion rules adopted by 
the taxonomy teams. The selection criterion 
used by the Dutch researchers favored terms 
related to temperament; excluded terms relat -
ed to intellect, talents, and capacities; and in -
cluded a number of extremely negative evalu -
ative terms, such as perverse, sadistic,  and 
criminal.  The German team explicitly includ -
ed intellect and talent descriptors but omitted 
attitudes and evaluative terms, which were 
included in separate categories. In contrast, 
the American English taxonomy included at -
titudinal terms such as liberal, progressive,  
and provincial,  along with a number of intel -
lect terms. Given the diverse range of traits 
related to the fifth factor, it is less surprising 
that the German and English factors shared 
the intellect components, whereas the Dutch 
factor included some imagination-  related 
traits (e.g., inventive, original, imaginative ) 
but otherwise emphasized unconventionality 
and was thus interpreted initially as a “Rebel -
liousness” factor.One Italian trait taxonomy (Caprara & 
Perugini, 1994) found a similar fifth factor 
interpreted as Unconventionality: Not sur -
prisingly, these Italian researchers had fol -
lowed the Dutch selection procedures rather 
than the German procedures, which likely 
would have represented more Intellect terms 
in the initial item pool. A second (and in -
dependent) team of Italian taxonomers (Di 
Blas & Forzi, 1998) failed to find the same 
factors as the first (see also de Raad, Di Blas, 
& Perugini, 1998). Given that both teams 
started with the same lexical material  (Ital -
ian personality descriptors), their lack of 
convergence serves to illustrate the inherent 
difficulties in standardizing taxonomic pro -
cedures and factor-  analytic decisions across 
cultures and languages. How can we expect 
the Big Five to generalize across languages 
when two studies of the same language fail 
to show factor generalizability?
Thus, apparent failures to replicate the 
Big Five structure can be hard to interpret. 
For example, Szirmak and de Raad (1994) 
examined Hungarian personality descrip -
tors and found strong support for the first 
four but failed to obtain a factor resembling 
the fifth of the Big Five. Instead, when they 
forced a five-  factor solution, the Agreeable -
ness factor split into two factors. Should this 
finding be counted as a failure to replicate 
the Big Five, suggesting that Hungarians do 
not differ systematically on traits related to 
imagination, creativity, and intellect? Prob -
ably not: When six factors were rotated, an 
Intellect/Openness factor did emerge in the 
Hungarian data. Again, we suspect that this 
finding may be due to differences in the way 
the initial item pool was selected. In their 
review of this literature, Saucier, Hampson, 
and Goldberg (2000) conclude that “given 
these and other differences among studies, 
is it any wonder that investigators might dis -
agree about the evidential basis for a par -
ticular structural representation?” (p. 23).
Evidence in Non-  Germanic Languag -
es. Lexical research has now been extended 
to an growing range of non-  Germanic lan -
guages, such as Chinese (Yang & Bond, 
1990), Czech (Hrebickova & Ostendorf, 
1995), Greek (Saucier, Georgiades, Tsouasis, 
& Goldberg, 2005), Hebrew (Almagor et al., 
1995), Tagalog in the Philippines (Church, 
Reyes, Katigbak, & Grimm, 1997), and so 