Translation psychology: Broadening the research framework

Abstract

Translation psychology studies translators’ underlying emotional, cognitive, behavioural, and social factors at play in the translation process. This chapter tackles the ways in which translation psychology is contributing to the advancement of translation studies by extending its conceptual and methodological frameworks and offers a brief reflection on research priorities in this subfield of our discipline. First, we present the achievements from those areas serving as crucial means and tools for the development of research in translation psychology, i.e., cultural and cross-cultural psychology, evaluation and assessment, and research design and methods. Then, we revise advances in the study of individual differences—differential psychology, motivation and emotion, and psycholinguistic and cognitive processes. Moving on to applied factors, recent developments addressing organisational, educational, and social psychology are also described. Beyond any doubt, translation psychology has already achieved encouraging results, but there is still a long road ahead. Methodological obstacles, such as the need for bigger population samples, more triangulation of data, and the replication of studies for the greater generalisability of results, still often stand in the way. However, never before have we witnessed such resolute efforts to overcome these limitations.