How happy are legal translators at their work? Further findings from a cognitive–affective enquiry

ABSTRACT

The translator’s happiness at work has been gaining academic attention with new transdisciplinary stimuli from psychology and identity studies in the wake of a sociological paradigm shift and translator studies. The overarching aim of this follow-up study is to compare perceptions of happiness at work in Slovak sworn and institutional (i.e. EU) translators from a cognitive–affective standpoint. The article also strives to determine and compare the subjects’ affective feelings when translating through the IWP Affect Questionnaire. The research reveals that the majority of the legal translators show positive “happiness styles”, but there are some pronounced between-cohort differences which are discussed in detail. The prevalence of positive over negative affective feelings has been confirmed via happiness metrics. The results of the cognitive–affective research in the Slovak social space enhance the investigations into translators’ happiness at work by an analysis of their socio-psychological identities through a lens of affective translation studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Sociology of translation
• happiness at work (HAW)
• sworn translator
• institutional translator
• Veenhoven’s framework of happiness
• IWP Affect Questionnaire

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Life satisfaction theories associate happiness with “a favourable attitude towards one’s life as a whole”, hedonists put happiness on a par with “the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience” and lastly, the emotional state theory “identifies happiness with an agent’s emotional condition as a whole” (Haybron 2019, 7–8).

2 In sociology, the distinction between social and psychological capital is sometimes used instead of livability of environment and life-ability of the person (Veenhoven 2015, 6).

3 In psychological research, the given scales are often abbreviated as SHS, SWLS, iPPQ and PANAS, respectively.

4 This measure of affect was developed by the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield in the UK, whose name is reflected in its abbreviation.

5 The selected analytical framework and research methods including the questionnaire template had already been tested with literary translators in my previous research (see Bednárová-Gibová 2020).

6 The truth might be, however, that there are also philosophical arguments against “the classical utilitarian focus on happiness as the aim of social choice” (Haybron 2019, 7), questioning the idea that hedonism should be one’s sole concern.

7 The five-graded response categories in the questionnaire were converted into numerical values between 1 and 5, with 1 representing the lowest degree (“never/seldom”) and 5 the highest degree (“always”). The use of numerical values makes it possible to calculate the mean values of the responses.

8 The total of the sworn translators in Table 2 is not tantamount to 83 in all responses as the subjects evidently failed to mark some frequency response items in the question grid possibly because of their inattentiveness.

9 The questionnaire item responses were scored in the following way: 0 = never/seldom, 1 = some of the time, 2 = about half of the time, 3 = much of the time and 4 = always (for more details, see Liu 2011, 83–86).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Klaudia Bednárová-Gibová

Klaudia Bednárová-Gibová is an Associate Professor of translation studies at the Institute of British and American Studies at the University of Presov in Slovakia. She has published extensively on institutional translation and aspects of text-oriented analysis in (non-)literary translation. More recently, she has extended her research interests to the sociology of translation focusing on translators as a social and professional group with a keen interest in their domain-specific well-being. With over 15 years of translation and proofreading experience, she is also a professional translator and transcreationist of mostly specialized texts working from/into English and German.