Can self-esteem and creative intelligence foster accuracy and creativity in professional translators?

Over this last decade translation process research has provided evidence for the importance of studying translators and interpreters’ individual differences so as to gain a better understanding of the cognitive processes involved in translation and the potential impact of the translator’s personality and emotions on translation performance. Drawing on previous research on the impact of self-esteem and creativity on translation, the present paper describes an experiment to measure the effect of self-esteem and creative intelligence on the written translation performance of a sample of 44 Spanish professional translators. The results reveal that (a) the more creative translators are, the more creative translations they produce; and (b) the higher translators’ self-esteem is, the lower the scores for accuracy.