On the impact of self-esteem, emotion regulation and emotional expressivity on student translators' performance

Abstract

Recent research in Translation Studies has bridged the fields of Translation and Psychology and highlighted that a translator's personality seems to play a role in the process of translation and in the creation of target texts (e.g., Bolaños-Medina, 2014; Bontempo & Napier, 2014; Hubscher-Davidson, 2007, 2009, 2013, 2016). The present paper describes the results of a study to measure the impact of certain emotional and personality traits on the performance of 45 Spanish student translators. Validated Spanish versions of Rosenberg's (1965) Self-esteem Scale, Gross and John's (2003) Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and Gross and John's (1995) The Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire were used to assess variation in participants in terms of self-esteem, emotion regulation, and expressivity. A total of three translation tasks carried out by student translators throughout the semester were assessed using an agreed evaluation sheet. The results reveal significant relations between the facets of expressive suppression and negative expressivity with regard to student translators' performance, suggesting that those who tend to hide or inhibit emotional states and responses are more likely to perform better in translation tasks and those who habitually tend to display negative emotions are more likely to perform worse in translation tasks.