A comparative study of professional well-being in agency and freelance translators

Abstract

Departing from a sociological paradigm shift and the contemporary appeal to re-humanize translation studies, the paper anthropocentrically zooms in on agency translators and freelancers as important actors of translation practice. In the attempt to highlight translators as human beings with their voices and feelings in their uneasy occupational realities, the paper aims to compare professional well-being in agency and freelance translators based on four Dam and Zethsen’s status parameters and psychological variables of happiness at work (HAW). The paper reports results of a questionnaire-based survey completed by 93 agency translators and 84 freelancers in Slovakia. The translator’s self-perceptions of the selected variables are compared using measures of central tendency and their HAW profile emanates from a correlation analysis. The results of the analysis imply that the studied minor language translators show comparably high levels of professional well-being although they slightly differ in some ‘facet-specific’ happiness. Although embedded in the Slovak translational reality, an analysis of the translators’ professional well-being uncovers important specificities of the minor socio-psychological identities which can contribute to a research puzzle of the particularities of translators’ professional well-being in major linguocultures. The paper points to the added value of integrating insights from psychology into sociological TS research, thus creating a common reflection space.