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Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 65:2 (2019) ► pp.264–285

Immersed in the source text

The role of psychological transportation in literary translation

| University of Murcia

This study aims at exploring the phenomenon of psychological transportation in translation from an experimental approach. Firstly, we investigate whether the emotions depicted in source texts may influence the level of transportation experienced by translators. Secondly, we try to determine whether different levels of transportation in the texts can make a difference in terms of translation performance. Based on previous work about narrative transportation in products of fiction, as well as the phenomenon known as the “paradox of pleasurable sadness”, we depart from the hypothesis that sad texts lead to a higher degree of psychological transportation than happy texts (H1). Taking into account previous theories and empirical results about the benefits of visualization and emotional engagement in translation, we also predict that highly-transported participants will render higher-quality (H2) and more creative translations (H3) than low-transported participants. For this purpose, a pilot study was conducted consisting of two literary translation tasks with opposing-valence texts (happy vs. sad). Lack of statistically significant differences for our hypothesis suggests that some adjustments in the methodology would be needed to achieve conclusive results; however, we believe that further research on the impact of transportation in translation quality and creativity is still worthwhile.

Keywords: psychological transportation, narrative engagement, emotions, translation performance, empathy
Article outline
  • 1.The phenomenon of psychological transportation in literature
  • 2.How psychological transportation can affect translation performance
    • 2.1Visualization and translation performance
    • 2.2Emotional engagement and translation performance
  • 3.Aim and hypothesis
  • 4.Participants
  • 5.Materials
  • 6.Design of the study
    • 6.1Task and procedure
    • 6.2Translation assessment criteria
  • 7.Results
    • 7.1Results for hypothesis 1
    • 7.2Results for hypothesis 2
    • 7.3Results for hypothesis 3
    • 7.4Results of the post-task questionnaire
  • 8.General discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 May 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00091.nar
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