Author(s)

Jiayi Han^1,2

¹School of Foreign Languages, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China.
²Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK.

Do different emotions produce different emotionally oriented translations in people’s translation practice? The study of embodied cognition theory reveals that the process of generating emotions through the auditory perception of music is a form of embodied expression that the generation and change of emotions have a certain influence on the translation practice of translators, and that different emotional changes can lead to different translation results. In this paper, we utilize embodied cognitive theory to design an experiment in which a total of 20 participants evaluated the emotion of the original English text by administering a questionnaire to assess the emotion of the original English text on a five-point scale. The 60 participants were then divided into two groups of 30 participants each, and the same English text was translated by listening to two different emotionally oriented music, “Golden Snake Dance” and “The Moon Over a Fountain”, and translating the same English text, the resulting 60 translations were analyzed for their emotional values by using the ROST software, and based on the results, a comparative analysis of the two experiments was carried out, which revealed that the two groups of completed translations showed different emotional orientations and that the emotional values produced a great difference between positive and negative values, which further demonstrates the influence of emotions on translation practice. The process of perceiving emotional changes through the use of the auditory system is actually embodied, which can not only be reflected in daily behavioral performance, but can also be applied to translation practice. The difference in emotional states will directly lead to translations produced by translation practice, which display differences in the emotional orientation of translations under the effect of different emotions, providing a new way of thinking for translators to study translations of the same English original text that generate multiple emotional understandings, and promoting the development of diversity in translation research.

Embodied Cognition, Embodiment, Translation Practice, Emotion, Experiment

Han, J. (2023) The Role of Emotion in the Translation Process from the Perspective of Embodied Cognition. Psychology, 14, 1395-1412. doi: 10.4236/psych.2023.148079.