The study of happiness in the workplace has become an interest of sociologists and it has been gaining more and more attention in the academic circles over the years.
In fact, several scales have been designed in the past 60 years to gauge happiness among workers in the work environment, including the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and the multifaceted instrument designed by Rodríguez-Castro’s in 2015, among others.
The translation profession is no exception and has had its share of such polls, which, based a Daqeeq’s review of literature in the field, were mainly based on a quantitative methodology that includes a questionnaire and a set of questions that vary from a study to another. The majority of these studies deal with perceptions and subjective assessment of the profession and the workplace and researchers seek to analyze responses concerning certain factors and come up with conclusions and findings.
One study looked into five factors: status, remuneration, visibility, power and influence, and appreciation, in addition to the correlation between age and the level of happiness at work. Like every person at work, the social status of the translators’ job is an element of happiness due to the way society perceive them as elite. Satisfaction with the financial compensation for the job is also important, especially if the translator believes that he or she is receiving what they deserve of money and fringe benefit. The last thing an employer needs is to have his team members worry about making odds meet or the welfare of their families.
Related to this is appreciation. Any employee doing his or her job deserves a tap on the shoulder, which should take a form of an incentive package for good achievers. Translators work day and night and in weekend to meet deadlines, which place pressure and cause stress to translators, and for those who are not aware of such a challenge, deadlines are tough, so the least a supervisor or a business owner can do is to show appreciation for their job and incentivize the team for better performance.
In general, according to the studies reviewed, translators seem to be fairly satisfied with their jobs, ranking in the middle. CareerExplorer has conducted a survey and it turned out that translators “rate their career happiness 3.1 out of 5 stars which puts them in the bottom 44% of careers.” The scale used focused on salary: “Are translators happy with their salary? Meaning: Do translators find their jobs meaningful? Personality fit: How well suited are people’s personalities to their everyday tasks as translators? Work environment: How enjoyable are translator’s work environments? Skills utilization: Are translators making the best use of their abilities?”.
Naturally, translation as a profession is not homogeneous, as it involves a wide range of specialties, such as legal, literary, media, medical translations… etc. There are also interpreters, translation editors and proofreaders, supervisors, home-based translators and others. Studies have compared between pairs of these specializations to measure workers’ perceptions of their jobs, and findings were somehow close: Translators are not extremely happy, but do not feel very bad about their profession.
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