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Article published In:
Translation, Cognition & Behavior
Vol. 1:2 (2018) ► pp.319–340

Moving music for moving source texts

The influence of emotional music in translation performance

| Universidad de Murcia

Based on previous findings about the role of music as an emotional stimulus, as well as the potential benefits of music-driven emotional engagement in written production and creative behaviour, the present study investigates the impact of emotional background music on translation quality and creativity. A translation experiment in two different conditions (music vs. silence) was conducted in a controlled environment. Participants translated two literary texts of opposing emotional contents (happy vs. sad) while they listened to an emotionally-matching soundtrack. Statistical analysis of within- and between-group comparisons only revealed conclusive results for the sad condition, showing a positive effect of sad music on translation creativity and a negative effect on accuracy.

Keywords: background music, emotional involvement, mood regulation, translation performance, translation creativity
Article outline
  • 1.Music as a source of emotion
  • 2.Invisible threads between music and translation performance
  • 3.Aim and hypothesis
  • 4.Participants
  • 5.Materials
    • 5.1Initial questionnaire
    • 5.2Source texts
    • 5.3Musical stimuli
    • 5.4Retrospective questionnaire
  • 6.Experimental design
  • 7.Procedure
  • 8.Results
    • 8.1Results for hypothesis 1
      • 8.1.1Accuracy (acc)
      • 8.1.2Transfer ST-TT
    • 8.2Results for hypothesis 2
    • 8.3Results on the retrospective questionnaire
  • 9.General discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 27 September 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tcb.00014.nar
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