Monkeycage: World values lost in translation

Below from Monkeycage website: Link

"At the dawn of the 21st century, the Vietnamese were the most authoritarian people in the world, according to the World Values Survey. Ninety-nine percent of the survey’s respondents in Vietnam in 2001 said they favored military rule. ... In the next round of the survey only a few years later, however, only a third of the samples in Vietnam supported military rule...What happened is that the World Values Survey switched translations.

In 2001, the survey in Vietnam translated the English question about “Having the army rule” as “Vai trò của quân đội,” meaning “The role of the military,” I am told by a Vietnam expert. So respondents who answered “very good” or “good” may have been applauding the role of the military, not the rule of the military. "