Olha Lehka-Paul

Can research into translator’s personality inform translation training programmes?
Olha Lehka-Paul, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland

The cognitive and psycholinguistic approach to translation didactics with Kiraly (1995) as one of its major representatives promotes the importance of the translator’s self-concept for the successful acquisition of translation competence and expertise. One of the elements of the self-concept is the translator’s personality that incorporates psychological, cognitive (Jakobsen 2002, Carl et al. 2011) and affective dimensions (Lehr 2013, Cifuentez-Férez and Fenollar-Cortés 2017). The psychological domain, which has so far received limited attention from scholars (Henderson 1987, Kurz et al. 1996, Hubscher Davidson 2009), may offer answers to the questions such as: (1) why certain people are attracted to the profession of a translator, (2) how the translator’s “individual working styles” (Hansen 2013) correlate with their psychological descriptors, and (3) whether and how personality influences the quality of the translation process and product (cf. Jääskelainen 2016).  

The present study aims to empirically investigate the role of the translator’s psychological traits (stable characteristics) and functions (dynamic entities) in the translation process and product. The experiment involved 30 translation trainees, 16 practicing translators and 94 non-translators. The translators’ task was to translate two short texts (about 250 words) in Translog, the key-logging programme (Jakobsen and Schou 1999). HEXACO Personality Inventory (Ashton and Lee 2009) and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers 1962) were used to measure psychological traits and functions respectively. The quality of the translated texts was measured by two markers on the basis of Williams’ (2009) weighted assessment grid. The results of the experiment show that translators differ from the representatives of other professions in their distribution of traits, and their preferred psychological functions influence their self-monitoring strategies displayed in self-revision behaviour. Addressing the above questions, the findings of the study inform the student recruitment procedure and translation curricular about the potential role of personality features in successful translation performance.

References:

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Cifuentez-Férez, Paula and Javier Fenollar-Cortés. 2017. “On the impact of self-esteem, emotion regulation and emotional expressivity on student translators’ performance”, Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics 14, 71-97.

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