A study that identifies and prioritizes the key personality traits that contribute to professional interpreter effectiveness - Frontiersin.org
With increasingly fast-changing technologies and deepened globalization, the status and responsibilities of industrial interpreters is being radically transformed. Technological developments in artificial intelligence (AI), speech recognition (SR), and machine translation (MT) are transforming language services delivery, bringing to opportunities as well as to challenges for human professionals (Liu et al., 2024; Jiang and Lu, 2021). With increasingly complex and demanding in interpreting tasks and technology use, the interpreter profession is being redefined (Li and Zhang, 2023). Interprets now bear not only great role functions but also carry their unique psychological and interpersonal qualities. These changes necessitate the growing role personality traits that play a significant role in keeping interpreters professionally viable, resilient, and adaptable (Moser-Mercer, 1994). Therefore, interpreter training must move beyond language and cognitive skill acquisition to include the formation of essential personality traits to prepare future interpreters for the psychological and ethical demands of the current interpreting profession.
Emotional resilience is now a requisite trait for interpreters working in high-stress environments. For example, Bontempo and Napier (2011) have confirmed emotional stability as a strong predictor of interpreters' self-assessed competence since lower neuroticism and anxiety are associated with better professional functioning. What's more, Perdikaki and Georgiou (2022) revealed how subtitlers, just like interpreters, work continuously with emotionally charged content and develop personal coping strategies to maintain mental health. Similarly, MartÃnez-Mart and Ruch (2016) introduced emotional strengths, for instance self-regulation and emotional awareness as more significant predictors of resilience than often-studied predictors such as optimism and social support. These studies collectively highlight that interpreters' ability to stay calm and emotionally balanced under stress is critical to guaranteeing accuracy and ethical commitment in interpreting assignments.