Personality Traits and Translation: The Effect of Introvert and Extrovert Personality Types on Translation Quality of Political and Journalistic Texts

The current study is interdisciplinary research having a psychological look at the quality of translated texts. This work was an endeavor to probe the effect of the translators' personality- extrovert and introvert- on the translation quality of political and journalistic texts. It also explored the effect of the graduation level on the translation quality. To achieve the ends, the data was obtained from 50 graduate and 50 undergraduate students majoring in English translation at different Iranian universities. The translated texts were assessed by three ratters using Farahzad’s model (1992) of translation quality assessment. The results of independent samples t-test revealed that the personality characteristics of the participants did not have significant effect on the translation quality. Moreover, the results of ANOVA indicated that the extrovert students had a better performance than the introverts in the accuracy scale, but the reverse pattern emerged in the case of style scale where the introverts outperformed the extroverts. The research has attempted to consider the interrelationship between psychology and translation field and can be beneficial for importing concepts and theories from the field of psychology. Regarding the results, "introversion" and "extroversion" can be considered as two sources of variation in translation process and outcome.