EXPLORING THE LITERARY TRANSLATOR’S WORK-RELATED HAPPINESS: THE CASE STUDY OF SLOVAKIA

Abstract

In compliance with Translator Studies and its accompanying sociological turn the translator’s work-related happiness is beginning to attract the attention of scholars after having been largely sidestepped in empirical translation studies (TS) research. Although it could be objected that the issue of happiness offers ground only for speculative philosophy, it became a subject of research in the humanities and more recently also in TS. As much as culture dictates that literary translation is an elegant avocation, the harsh reality in Slovakia is that it can be considered as a form of activism in the context of being scandalously underpaid when compared to other translation segments. This paper aims to determine the perception of work-related happiness in Slovak literary translators based on Veenhoven’s (2015) concept of happiness and seeks the greatest sources of their satisfaction at work. The second part of the paper attempts to identify the literary translators’ affective feelings, using the IWP Affect Questionnaire. The results of this study shed fresh light on the psychological and emotional facets of the literary translator’s persona using a triangulation of insights from psychology, identity studies and TS. A quantitative enquiry into the selected translator habitus offers research stimuli for comparison with other literary translators’ nationalities as well as other translation segments.