Personality, Motivation And Interpreting Performance

Individual difference is one of the important directions of interpreting aptitude research,although studies on individual differences in interpreting mostly focus on psychological and language aspects of interpreting competence that correlate closely to interpreting performance.Attention on the more general individual difference variables and their effects on interpreting performance was insufficient.This study focuses on the personality and motivation dimensions of individual differences,in an attempt to explore the personality and motivation characteristics of MTI student interpreters and their effects on student interpreters’ performance through a methodological combination of experiment and interviews.To this end,this paper uses the extroversion-introversion personality dimension of the Big Five Inventory for personality and the Language Learning Orientations Scale(LLS)proposed by Noels et al.(2000)under the framework of Self-Determination Theory.Six graduate students of interpreting major were tested on fidelity and fluency for interpreting performance in an English to Chinese simultaneous interpreting test.A semi-structured interview was conducted to map out their personality and motivational traits of the subjects and how the two individual variables affected their learning process.Subjects of different personality and motivation types were compared for their fidelity and fluency levels,and factors that could explain the influence of two individual variables on interpreting performance were explored.Results showed a significant difference between extraverted and introverted groups in interpretation fidelity,with the extraverts higher in fidelity level than the introverts.No significant difference in fluency was found between the groups with different personality types,and no significant difference in fidelity and fluency was found between the groups with different motivation types.Combining the results of related studies and interviews,this thesis suggests that the extraversion and introversion personality types affect interpretation performance through many factors such as working memory,short-term memory and anxiety,and communicative intention.This study also explores the possible reasons why no significant differences were found in the effects of different learning motivations on interpreting performance.The results of this study provide some inspiration for interpreting aptitude test and the selection of potential interpreters.Possible directions for future research are also discussed.