Translating Manner: the impact of violence on translation students’ strategies, affect and narrative transportation

Abstract

The present study explores the effects of reading and translating violent content on translation students’ affect, narrative transportation and strategies to reproduce manner information in the target text. Our hypotheses predict that negatively valenced content will influence translation students’ strategic behavior, levels of affect and narrative transportation differently from more neutral, positive content both after reading and translating. Results show that students added more manner information and made more mistakes in the negative text than in the neutral one. Violent content does not significantly impact students’ levels of negative affect, but increases their levels of narrative transportation to a greater extent than neutral content both after reading and translating. Nevertheless, results point to the greater potential of translation to foster narrative transportation.