Individual differences and quality of translation: A personality-based perspective

Abstract

The current study was targeted at investigating the relationship between translation students' personality types and the quality of their English-to-Persian translations with respect to different text types. To this aim, 35 undergraduate senior students of translation were randomly sampled. To obtain some demographic information about the participants, the researchers used a background questionnaire. The participants were given three different text types for the translation task. An advertisement, a scientific text and a narrative text were chosen to serve Reiss' text typology (1971) including operative, informative and expressive texts, respectively. The students were also provided with retrospective questionnaires to shed light on their performance in the act of translating. Subsequently, once the participants' personality types were determined via the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) anchored in Jung's psychological theory, their dominant mental functions involving intuition, sensation, feeling and thinking were identified. To analyze the data, the One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) procedure and post-hoc analysis were employed. The results of the study indicated that the only dichotomy showing a significant difference was that of intuition versus sensation. Simply put, the intuitors outperformed their sensor counterparts in the translation of the expressive text. Taking into account the findings of the current study, the researchers suggest some pedagogical guidelines too.