Exploring the effects of personality hardiness on interpreters' performance with interpreting anxiety as a mediator: An explanatory sequential mixed-methods study

Interpreting is a highly stressful activity and interpreters are accordingly expected to be stress-resistant. The stress-coping trait of personality hardiness predicts attainments in domains of the military, sport and so on. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, the present study was an attempt to explore whether personality hardiness facilitates interpreting performance in a sample of Chinese postgraduate student interpreters (n = 149) as it does in the aforementioned high-stress contexts. Based on the Hardiness Model, this study positioned interpreting anxiety as a mediator. Analysis of quantitative data suggested that personality hardiness not only correlated to but also predicted interpreting performance. Meanwhile, interpreting anxiety played a mediating effect on the link between personality hardiness and interpreting performance. Follow-up semi-structured interviews provided additional information regarding interviewees' perceptions and behavior during stressful interpreting situations, helping to explain and expand upon the initial quantitative results. Implications of the findings were also discussed.