Polish-English Certified Interpreter’s Psycho-Affectivity

The paper is an attempt at discussing the concept of the Polish-English certified interpreter’s psycho-affectivity by drawing attention to its constituent components – the so-called psycho-affective factors, which can be defined as the certified interpreter’s individual psychological features which are related to different thinking patterns, attitudes, emotional states, feelings or moods. The study covers seven such factors: anxiety, fear, language inhibition/language ego/language boundaries, extroversion/introversion/ambiversion, self-esteem, motivation and stress. The paper starts with some preliminary remarks concerning the subfield of interpreting studies dealing with the psychological phenomena observed during interpreting – interpreter psychology and its research theme – psycho-affectivity constituted by the psycho-affective factors. What follows is a discussion of the outcomes of a study carried out among 76 Polish-English interpreters on their subjective experience of the psycho-affective factors and their impact on certified consecutive interpreting performance and its final product – the output. Generally speaking, this paper attempts at demonstrating that the interpreter’s psycho-affectivity is a continually active module of the interpreter’s psychological construction, composed of the seven elements, the occurrence and activity of which are sometimes impossible to be consciously controlled

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