The effect of attitude towards Catalonia’s independence on response latency when translating ideologically conflicting press headlines

Abstract

The present paper explores the role of political ideology in translation by focusing on the influence that the affective charge of sociopolitical concepts may have on the translation process of 51 Catalan translation students in the specific context of Catalonia’s independence crisis. The study tests whether the students’ political position in the independence conflict in Catalonia influences the time they use to understand newspaper headlines on the independence crisis and choose a suitable translation. Participants’ reaction times are assumed to be influenced by the relevance of expressions whose ideological content matches or not participants’ position in the conflict. Results from the study report no significant interaction for the congruency between participants’ ideology and the content of source text or translation options. But even if no statistical significance is reported, the tendency observed in the data reveals that the influence of affectively congruent or incongruent content on response time may be different for ST understanding as compared with making a final decision on the translation equivalent. In our study, ideologically congruent stimuli slowed reaction time down during ST comprehension, but speeded it up when making a final decision to select a suitable equivalent.