Personality Type and Translation Performance of Persian Translator Trainees

Abstract

The study investigated the relationship between the personality typology of a sample of Iranian translation students and their translation quality in terms of expressive, appellative, and informative text types. The study also attempted to identify the personality types that can perform better in English to Persian translation of the three text types. For that purpose, the personality type and the translation quality of the participants was assessed using Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) personality test and translation quality assessment (TQA), respectively. The analysis of the data revealed that the personality type of the participants seemed relevant to the translation quality of all the text types. The translation quality of the participants with intuitive and thinking types was significantly better than the sensing type counterparts in translating expressive texts. The participants with intuitive and feeling types also performed better than their counterparts with sensing type in translation of the informative text. Moreover, the participants with intuitive, feeling, and thinking personality types performed more successfully than the participants with sensing type in translation of the appellative text. The findings of the study are discussed in light of the existing research literature.

Translation Performance in Intuitive and Sensing-Type Personalities

“…As for the other levels of errors in the category of meaning transfer, results indicate that the average error rate values for sensing-type participants surpass those of the intuitive participants, which denotes that sensing participants may have challenges when it comes to writing and translation skills. This supports the findings of Hubscher-Davidson (2009), Karimniia and Mahjubi (2013) and Shaki and Khoshsalighehi (2017). This study's results show that sensingtype individuals obtained the highest average rate of errors associated with misunderstanding the source text while translating text 1, whereas intuitive participants scored less than half of what sensing-type individuals scored in the same category (Figure 3).…”

“…The hypothesis of this study states that sensing-type participants may not be as successful as intuitive-type participants with regard to English-Arabic translation performance. Thus, this paper will use the ATA error parameters to micro-analyze sensing-type individuals' performance reports in order to determine whether they fall within the category of unsuccessful translators and writers as argued by Karimniia and Mahjubi (2013), and Shaki and Khoshsalighehi (2017). This study also compares sensing-types' performance with their counterpart, the intuitive-types.…”

“…Karimniia and Mahjubi (2013) underscore that the absence of originality and imagination in the sensing-type translators' personalities might be behind their failure to translate well (p. 50). Shaki and Khoshsalighehi (2017) studied the connection between translation quality and different personality types using Persian and English as the language pair. Their findings stated that intuitive-thinking (NT) types outperformed all other types (p. 130).…”

Theme markedness in the translation of student translators

“…As the text translated is a news item text that informs events to the readers, translators should have intuitive personality using their innovative thoughts (Myers et al, 1998) before deciding the best equivalent for certain specific terms. In their research, Shaki and Khoshsaligheh (2017) found that the participants with intuitive and feeling personality types performed better than their counterparts with sensing personality type in translation of the informative text. In addition, this is in line with the purpose of applying textual metafunction in translation requiring translators to find the right equivalent for the right context by referring to its textual function.…”

Is Working from Home Good for Work-Life Balance, Stress, and Productivity, or does it Cause Problems?

“…Basically, employee work productivity is the result of a series of behaviors that are carried out by employees in work situations (Hartini, Fakhrorazi, & Islam, 2019) and determine viability and profitability for the organization (Islam, Osman, Othman, & Raihan, 2019;Van Nguyen, Doan, Nu, Quoc, & Quynh, 2021). Productivity is also an important mechanism for management to clarify performance goals and standards, and to motivate individuals to ensure the sustainability of the organization (Shaki & Khoshsaligheh, 2017). It is also a rating system used in most companies to evaluate an employee's abilities (Khuong & Quoc, 2016).…”