Kääntäjän habitus fiktiivisten rakkaus- ja erokirjeiden valossa

Abstract

This article reports on a research project that elicited translators’ emotional narratives of their work with the aim of better understanding the contemporary scene of professional translation. The respondents (n = 102) represent EU translators, Finnish professional translators and translation students from two countries (Ireland and Finland). The method of data collection was “love letter/hate letter”, an exploratory tool borrowed from user experience research (Hanington & Martin 2012: 114). A total of 148 letters drafted by the respondents has been analysed, and the findings are contrasted with the notion of habitus put forward by Daniel Simeoni in his classic essay from 1998. A content and discourse analysis of translators’ predominantly positive emotions, their spatial discourses, preference for efficiency and yearning for freedom largely supports Simeoni’s hypothesis of translators’ voluntary subservience, but the results also suggest that his model is too simplified to fully capture the variability of empirical data.