Self‐Report and Physiological Arousal in Measuring Interpreting‐Related Anxiety: Experimental Evidence Gleaned from Eye‐Tracking

This study examines how anxiety, assessed through self‐report and galvanic skin response (GSR), affects visual attention and performance during Chinese–Japanese sight translation. Forty‐four graduate students completed sight‐translation tasks while their output, eye movements, and GSRs were recorded. Linear mixed‐effects modeling revealed that self‐reported interpreting‐related anxiety was a stronger and more consistent predictor of attention and performance than GSR across source‐language complexity and directionality. Greater anxiety was linked to longer visit durations, more frequent saccades, and lower performance, particularly during Chinese (L1)‐to‐Japanese (L2) translation. In contrast, GSR exhibited limited associations with output quality and no stable effects on eye‐movement patterns. Rather than indicating that physiological arousal is irrelevant, these findings suggest that self‐reported anxiety and autonomic activation capture different facets of the stress experience and may operate at different levels of processing. The partial dissociation between the two measures further implies that some untrained interpreters might cognitively amplify stress beyond their physiological responses. Overall, the study highlights the need to integrate emotional awareness and self‐regulation training with cognitive and linguistic skill development in interpreter education.