“Will I make it or will I make a fool of myself”: Polish-English certified interpreters’ experience of anxiety

Abstract

The paper presents a study of the psycho-affective factor of anxiety experienced by Polish-English certified interpreters while performing certified consecutive interpreting. The first part of the article sketches the theoretical background of the study, by focusing on interpreter psychology, a subfield of interpreting studies offering the methodological scaffolding for the study of interpreting-related psychological phenomena, and on anxiety as one of the components of the interpreter’s psycho-affectivity. What follows is an overview of certified interpreting in the Polish context. The major part of the article provides an insight into the study of the certified interpreters’ experience of anxiety—its types, causes, linguistic and extra-linguistic manifestations. What emerges from the study is that anxiety is quite a potent psycho-affective factor which is likely to obstruct certified interpreting performance and lower the quality of its outcome—the oral output.

Emotions, stress and related phenomena in public service interpreter and translator education and training

“…The role of emotions, anxiety, stress, personality, and other aspects of psycho-affectivity in interpreter and translator training has been discussed by scholars such as Jiménez Ivars and Pinazo Calatayud (2001), Napier (2011), Schweda-Nicholson (2005), Johnson (2016), Korpal (2017), Wu (2016), Lee (2018), Prada Prada (2019), Walczyński (2021b), to name just a few. Many of these authors highlight that real-life interpreting is an emotionally taxing and rarely stress-free activity and that a variety of psycho-affective factors may (and indeed do) influence both trainees in interpreting education and interpreters in their work.…”

Thesis writing anxiety among Polish translation students: Findings from a survey study

“…The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as "an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes such as increased blood pressure" (APA, 2023). It is one of the psycho-affective factors, together with fear, language inhibition, language boundaries, personality dimension, self-esteem, motivation and stress (Walczyński, 2021). According to the APA (2022), stress and anxiety share similarities but are differentiated by their root causes and the persistence of the emotional response.…”