Emotional Intelligence for Translation and Interpreting Students

Abstract

Inter- and intra-personal competencies have been recognized as important generic competencies included in the standards for translation and interpreting professions, issued by the national authorities worldwide These competencies actually comprise the so-called emotional intelligence skills. This is the reason why the authors of this paper, who have been teaching at the Translation and Interpreting Department from Skopje at the “Ss. Cyril and Methodius” University for more than a decade, have recognized the possibility to use language learning to enhance the awareness of the importance of emotional intelligence both for students’ professional and personal development. In addition, students also need positive emotions in the classroom because the future translators and interpreters have stressful experiences on a daily basis as the rate of development of the most relevant competencies for their future professions is continuously assessed by their teachers. This paper presents the results of the implementation of activities that affect emotional intelligence with the subject content activities of an academic course in Cultural Studies, thus fostering both subject and generic competencies relevant for translation and interpreting students We shall discuss the students’ results of the pre course and post course Leadership Toolkit: Emotional Intelligence questionnaire on their EI skills as well as the results from two relevant questionnaires prepared for the purpose of this paper research, on the effects of the emotional activities implemented at the translation and interpreting courses and answered anonymously by the fourth-year students who attended the Course in the summer semester 2023. In order to check the relevance of the implemented EI activities in the Cultural Studies we use the Six Seconds EI Model.