Freelance Translator Success and Psychological Skill: A Study of Translator Competence with Perspectives from Work Psychology

Abstract

This thesis is an investigation of freelance translators from the perspective of both Translation Studies and Industrial/Organisational (I/O) Psychology. In it, we look at descriptive and inferential statistics from two samples—one of 43 participants based in New Zealand, and the second of 92 participants based in various countries. We also conducted ten interviews, in which participants explain their own experiences in detail. Purpose: The purpose is primarily to further understand the working lives of freelance translators, and secondly to understand how our theory of psychological skill relates to freelancers’ success in their work (both in objective and subjective terms). Psychological skill is made up of evaluations of participant self-efficacy, locus of control, and attributions of both negative and positive events, all of which demonstrate adaptive skill in dealing with professional challenges. We propose that psychological skill is an important link in the model of the relationship between job ability and motivation, job constraints, and subsequent job performance in translation. The whole project is nested within further work in the field of translator competence, combined with aspects of I/O Psychology. We also aim to provide a quantitative, descriptive snapshot of the translation industry both in New Zealand and overseas. Findings: We found that various key measures of professional success (e.g. income, job satisfaction, number of jobs per week) were positively correlated with key components of psychological skill. Furthermore, we were able to utilize ordinal regression models, containing a combination of work-related and psychological skill variables, to predict both translators’ income and job satisfaction. The descriptive statistics and interview data revealed much of interest about translators’ work profiles. Originality and value: This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first research project to approach the study the career profiles of freelance translators from a methodologically rigorous, quantitative perspective, combining numerical results with rich interview data. Its value is in terms of both description of translation as a career and as an industry, and in terms of possible training and education for both new and future translators. Using methodology from I/O Psychology also contributes an understanding of translator competence, complementing and building on existing competence models.