44 I. THEORETICAL  PERSPECTI vES AND  CONCEPT uAL uNITS
important within that culture’s particular 
social context. Although central from the 
vantage point of the lexical approach, cross- 
language research is difficult and expensive 
to conduct, and until the 1990s, it was quite 
rare. In the initial taxonomic studies, Eng -
lish was the language of choice, primarily 
because the researchers were American (see 
John et al., 1984, 1988).
Initial Studies in  Dutch and  German
The first two non-  English taxonomy proj -
ects involved Dutch and German, both Ger -
manic languages closely related to English. 
The Dutch projects, carried out by Hofstee, 
de Raad, and their colleagues at the Univer -
sity of Groningen (de Raad, Mulder, Kloos -
terman, & Hofstee, 1988; Hofstee et al., 
1997; see de Raad, Perugini, Hrebickova, & 
Szarota, 1998, for a review), yielded conclu -
sions generally consistent with those from 
the American English research: Only five 
factors were replicable across different se -
lections of trait adjectives and across differ -
ent subject samples. Those five factors were 
similar to the English Big Five, although the 
fifth Dutch factor emphasizes elements of 
Unconventionality and Rebelliousness rath -
er than Intellect and Imagination, as found 
in English.
The German taxonomy project (Angleit -
ner, Ostendorf, & John, 1990) began with a 
comprehensive “psycholexical” study of the 
German personality vocabulary. The study 
was explicitly based on the prototype con -
ception and improved on earlier studies in 
several respects. In particular, 10 indepen -
dent judges classified all the terms obtained 
from the dictionary as traits, states, social 
evaluations, and so forth, thus providing a 
continuous measure of the prototypicality 
of each term for each category and also a 
check on the reliability and validity of the 
judgments. The resulting German personal -
ity lexicon is more convenient to use than 
the unwieldy Allport and Odbert lists, be -
cause prototypicality values are available for 
each term in 13 different content categories. 
Thus, it is easy to select subsets of prototypi -
cal traits, states, social evaluations, and so 
forth, from the total pool for further studies. 
Angleitner and colleagues’ (1990) research 
has served as a blueprint for subsequent tax -
onomic efforts in other languages.To test the structure underlying the Ger -
man trait terms, Ostendorf (1990) selected 
the most prototypical trait adjectives from 
the German taxonomy, and his factor analy -
ses of about 450 traits yielded the clearest 
replication of the Big Five so far. In addi -
tion to the prototypical traits representing 
the distillation of the German trait lexicon, 
Ostendorf also included German transla -
tions of several English personality instru -
ments—  a combined emic–etic design that 
allows researchers to establish empirically 
the similarity of indigenous (emic) factors to 
the factors translated from other languages 
and cultures (etic). Ostendorf found evidence 
for substantial cross-  language convergence.
However, this combined emic–etic strat -
egy is difficult to implement and, unfor -
tunately, has not been used consistently 
in research. Thus, researchers often reach 
conclusions about factor similarity by “eye -
balling” the item content of the factors in 
the indigenous language and comparing it 
to the typical factor definitions in English. 
That leaves much leeway to the investiga -
tors in finding (or not finding) a factor that 
another investigator might not have found. 
For example, a Hebrew factor defined pri -
marily by traits such as sophisticated, sharp, 
knowledgeable, articulate, and impressive 
would lead some researchers to conclude 
they found a clear Intellect factor, whereas 
Almagor, Tellegen, and Waller (1995) inter -
preted it as Positive Valence.
Problems with Translations and Under -
estimating Cross-  Language Congruence . 
Another methodological difficulty in cross- 
language research involves translations. Re -
searchers working within their indigenous 
language have to translate their concepts 
into English to communicate their findings 
in scientific journals, and much too often 
considerable slippage occurs in the transla -
tion process. For example, because “tem -
peramental” was listed as a definer of Extra -
version in German, one might hypothesize 
an important cultural difference here until 
one realizes that the German trait was prob -
ably temperamentvoll,  which has nothing 
to do with bad temper but means “full of 
life and energy,” as in vivacious  or passion -
ate. Similarly, the Italian trait term frizzante  
(translated as sparkling ) was not found to be 
related to intellect, as one might expect, but 