Diverse Personality Traits and Translation Quality: Preselected Items Evaluation and NEO Five-Factor Inventory

The present research paper aims at highlighting the relationship between the quality of translated texts and the personality traits of the participating translators who translated three text types from English to Persian. Forty postgraduate translation students were randomly selected as a sample. A questionnaire was designed and utilized to extract some information about the participants’ gender, age, education, and the years of translation experience. The participants were requested to translate three different text types: journalistic, legal, and political. They were also provided with a retrospective questionnaire (Orozco & Albir 2002) to elucidate their performance in the course of translating. Eight translation evaluators were asked to score all the translation drafts using the Preselected Items Evaluation (PIE) method (Kockaert & Segers 2017). As soon as the participants’ personality traits were identified through the NEO-FFI personality test, their main conceptual functions including openness-to-experience, agreeableness, neuroticism, and extraversion were identified. In order to analyse the data and to examine if any significant differences existed between the quality of translation and the personality traits, the one-way analysis of variance and the post-hoc analysis were applied. Consequently, the findings of the current research revealed that the only dichotomy illustrating a meaningful difference was that of openness-to-experience and neuroticism. To put it briefly, the open-to-experience participants outperformed the neurotic ones in the political translation task.

Jaar van publicatie:2017