Evidence Grading and Translation Consistency of Functional Antimicrobial Textile Terminology

The lack of evidence grading and translation standards for functional antimicrobial textile terminology has led to ambiguous definitions, inconsistent sources, and confusing translations, which hinders technology dissemination, standard mutual recognition, and international market compliance. This problem is particularly important for functional textiles, where antimicrobial performance, material structure, testing methods, and related technical terms need to be accurately expressed in international standards and engineering communication. In addition, with the development of multifunctional textiles, including electromagnetic shielding fabrics and wearable antenna substrates, terminology consistency has become increasingly relevant to interdisciplinary technical exchange. Focusing on these issues, this study constructs a GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) evidence grading analysis model to assess the authority of 187 core terms and conduct a quantitative analysis of their Chinese-English translation consistency. The results show that high-evidence terms, accounting for 37.97%, exhibit significantly greater translation stability, with a Mainstream Translation Coverage (MTC) of 91.3%, a Kappa consistency coefficient of 0.82, and a variation rate of only 2.1%. In contrast, low and very-low-evidence terms, accounting for 30.2%, have an MTC of only 42.6%, a Kappa value of 0.35, and a variation rate of 7.8%. The difference is highly significant according to an independent samples t-test. Spearman correlation analysis confirms a strong positive correlation between evidence grade and translation consistency (ρ = 0.68, p < 0.001), indicating that term authority is a key structural variable driving translation standardization. This study fills the gap in empirical research on terminology standardization and provides a quantifiable evaluation tool for functional textile terminology translation.