Wearing Your Heart on Your Translation

This study explores the role of affects in translation from a multidisciplinary perspective. Process-oriented translation studies have traditionally focused on cognition, paying limited attention to affective dimensions and to the potential benefits of positive affects. Targeting non-expert students, this research applies experimental methods and statistical analyses drawn from psychology to examine affective processes during translation. Grounded in positive psychology and translation studies, it investigates relationships between affective state, text type (literary vs. technical), and level of expertise. One hundred psychology postgraduate students translated either a technical text or a poem from English into French. Texts were pre-tested by expert translators to ensure equivalent difficulty and emotional neutrality. Participants completed affective state measures before and after the task. Results show that although both texts were perceived as equally difficult, the literary text was judged significantly less neutral. Translation was perceived as tedious, particularly for technical texts. Literary translation elicited more negative affects, while greater experience in English was associated with fewer negative affects regardless of text type.